Missed calls aren't just Yankees' problem; they are baseball's problem
Aaron Judge of the Yankees strikes out during the eighth inning against the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium on Friday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
The ball was low.
Fifty times this season, a pitch has been low and out of the zone on Aaron Judge but still called a strike, something that’s happened to him a major league-leading 417 times since 2016, when he made his debut.
And when the ball was low Friday, a called strike three in the eighth inning of a game the Yankees eventually lost, Aaron Boone did what he has so many times before — stalked onto the field, pointed and shouted, half in anger, half in frustration. All as if to say, “Do you see this? Do you see how this keeps happening?”
Boone didn’t get tossed then — that happened later, and for his fifth time this year, on a borderline strike call to Matt Carpenter — but the exasperation he experienced there certainly contributed to his blowup in the ninth. After the game, his loud protests were replaced by a near-whisper. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Boone said about the recurring issue. “I talked to people. They’re doing the best they can. I don’t know.”
Their best isn’t good enough.
No one outside of the Bronx is going to feel bad for Judge or the Yankees, who despite a recent hiccup have had nothing short of a charmed first half. But these missed calls aren’t just a Yankees problem, they’re a baseball problem.
Judge is the most popular baseball player on the planet right now, if All-Star voting is anything to go on, and his explosiveness and marketability make him exactly the type of athlete this league needs to grow the sport.
These botched calls essentially take the bat out of his hands — a little bit like replacing Michelangelo’s chisel with a butter knife — and stand to directly affect a slew of milestones, potentially even his quest for 60 home runs.
We get it: He’s 6-7, and it’s hard to gauge a strike zone when it’s a mile long. He also sees a lot of pitches — ninth-most in baseball, according to Baseball Savant. But he’s not the only tall man in the league, and he’s also been around for seven seasons — more than enough time for umpires to learn that a pitch that might be a strike for someone else was at his shoestrings. (Boone said he’s spoken to the league, but when contacted by Newsday, MLB declined to comment.)
Advanced sabermetric sites and various umpire watchdog accounts — things such as Umpire Scorecards — have added to the narrative by quantifying something that, in decades past, was little more than a vague idea of an “expanded zone.”
Judge has had 57 miscalled strikes this season, according to Baseball Savant, with 50 of them low and out of the zone, and both of those marks are most in baseball.
But the problem doesn’t stop there — and this is really why baseball should pay attention.
Throughout his career, Judge has proved to be mentally resilient: He survived New York as a highly touted prospect, emerged as a young leader and has continued to excel even as his contract status for next year remains unresolved. But plate discipline is a delicate dance, particularly in an era when pitchers are throwing harder and with more movement than ever have before.
Even if he doesn’t want to, Judge eventually will protect against the low called strike. That means more swings out of the zone, potentially weaker contact and more strikeouts.
There’s no telling if that’s affected him already, or if the expanded zone has any correlation to his recent slump, but it can’t possibly be helping. Going into Saturday, he was 8-for-his-last 42 (.191) with 17 strikeouts; that’s a 40.5% strikeout percentage for a player with a career 29.3 K%.
“As a hitter, it’s tough not to” let it affect you, Judge said. “When pitches get called low or off the plate, and then you start questioning your zone and kind of expanding a little bit. You’ve got to be mentally tough enough to move past it and stick to your approach.”
There is, of course, a natural solution to this — the introduction of the automated strike zone, something that seems as if it will happen eventually. But that’s a ways off for now, and even Judge isn’t for it.
After all, what’s baseball without the human element? (He’s also ever the diplomat and said, by and large, the umpires do a great job.)
“I just think you’ve got to get better,” he said. “If there’s an issue with balls and strikes, just get guys that do a better job of calling balls and strikes. I think it’s plain and simple like that.”
Plain and simple — as plain and simple as letters to knees, even if you’re 6-7. Even if you’re Aaron Judge.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
