The pitch from Sergio Romo of the San Francisco Giants in the bottom of the ninth inning crossed just below Bryce Harper's knee, and the umpire barked, "Strike," to Harper's frustration. Had it been called a ball, Harper would have been in command of the at-bat, with three balls and no strikes. Instead, he was as close to a strikeout as to a walk.
Harper flied out four pitches later. His team, the Washington Nationals, would lose that game, on Oct. 4, in 18 innings, and the Giants would be one victory closer to the World Series.
As important as it was in the Giants-Nationals series, Harper's at-bat also had a larger significance. It was typical of a subtle change in Major League Baseball's strike zone that has had a profound impact on baseball in the last several seasons.
The strike zone is bigger than it used to be, especially around batters' knees.
The change appears to stem from the league's growing use of video technology to evaluate umpires, which has led umpires to stick more closely to the official strike zone. And according to the rule book, the strike zone extends down to "the hollow beneath the kneecap." The enlarged strike zone, in turn, seems to be a major reason that strikeouts have risen and scoring has dropped sharply.
Two different analyses of pitch-tracking software have found that the strike zone has grown almost 10 percent over the last five years. It grew in each of the last five seasons and more in 2014 than in any previous season. Five years ago, pitches just below 21 inches high and over the plate were rarely called strikes. This season, they usually were, according to one of the analyses, by Jon Roegele, which appeared in Hardball Times.
"The strike zone has increased in size significantly," said Brian Mills, a professor of sports management at the University of Florida, and the author of the other analysis, "and it's had a huge impact on run scoring over the past eight years or so."
After peaking in 2000 at 5.14, the average number of runs per game fell to 4.07 this season -- a decline of more than 20 percent. It is the lowest level since the early 1980s and also matches the average from baseball's so-called dead-ball era of the early 20th century, when Cy Young and Walter Johnson were pitching. Strikeouts, meanwhile, have risen 19 percent since 2000, with most of the increase coming in the last five years.
This year's World Series teams, San Francisco and Kansas City, embody the change. They feature pedestrian lineups and bullpens full of fearsome throwers. They have made it to the World Series by frequently holding their postseason opponents to two runs or fewer.
Many television analysts and fans attribute the scoring drop to the advent of drug testing in recent years, which has seemed to put an end to hulking home run hitters like Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds. A ban on amphetamines may also have disproportionately affected hitters, who tend to play every day. But people who study baseball data argue that the story is more complicated than it appears.
Over the last decade, teams have begun to put more value on defense, using videotape to discover the best fielders, sign them to contracts and then position them in the most efficient place on the field. Teams are also emphasizing pitch framing, in which catchers try to make balls look like strikes by moving their glove slightly after catching a pitch. Pitchers, for their part, have learned to throw harder.
The new research shows that those pitchers also have the benefit of throwing to a larger strike zone than their predecessors.
The new part of the strike zone -- the areas where pitches are called strikes more than half of the time -- is roughly equal in size to a single row of baseballs, Mills said. That hypothetical row of balls does not extend to the corners of home plate, because pitches there are still called balls most of the time.
In interviews, some players and coaches said they had noticed an expansion in the strike zone, while others said they had not.
"The first few years I came up they emphasized calling the high strike zone a bit more," said Josh Willingham, a Royals outfielder who has been in the major leagues since 2004, " Maybe it's lowered a bit, yeah."
Sports on 10/25/2014