Seiya's getting screwed

He knows his zone better than the umps do, and that's a problem he needs to fix.

Seiya's getting screwed

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The Cubs frittered away another week in the National League Mild Card™ race, going 2-4 while the teams they’re “chasing” tried to let them catch up. The Barves were 4-2, but everybody else was meh or worse. The Mets went 3-3, the Giants were 2-4 and the Cardinals went 1-5.

With just 37 games left, the Cubs need to pick up five games. Well, how ‘bout them Bears?

At least over at The Athletic they’re done pretending this is a playoff race and are tackling the really pertinent issues. On Sunday, Sahadev answered the all-import question (that I also wondered about on Saturday)

“Why does Seiya get screwed by the umps so often?”

Sahadev looked up the stats to we don’t have to and honestly the only surprise was that there was even one player who has more balls called strikes than Seiya does.

According to Statcast, entering play on Saturday, of players who have seen at least 2,500 pitches outside the zone since 2022, Suzuki is second in all of baseball with 6.5 percent being called strikes. That’s just a tick below Wilmer Flores who is at 6.6 percent. They’re the only two players above 6 percent in baseball during that time.

It’s pretty incredible. It used to happen to Kris Bryant and Jorge Soler a lot when they were Cubs, but for them it was because they are so tall. Both are 6’5 and umpires would call pitches below their knees for strikes because for just about every other player that same location was thigh high. Seiya is not particularly tall. So that can’t be it.

In the article, Sahadev quotes Craig Counsell who theorizes that Seiya needs to complain more. His gentlemanly approach to getting fucked on pitches outside of the zone makes it easier for the umpires to forgive themselves for their transgressions. Counsell says that Todd Helton once told him that players need to complain on every close call so that umpires know they’re going to get an earful if they give the borderline pitch to the pitcher. I guess that might be something, although I would think that after a while umpires would just get pissed and go the other way as a big f-you to the guy who’s always complaining.

Counsell also says he thinks the glory day Yankees had an actual gameplan to scream and yell about close pitches that went against them. I think that might be a thing. It’s certainly a thing that their current manager who played on some of those latter day dynasty-adjacent Yankees (when he wasn’t blowing out his knee so they could trade for ARod), is a royal pain the ass to umpires from the dugout.

Aaron Boone never shuts the fuck up on any perceived slight against his hitters or pitchers.

Boone has gotten on umpires so often that earlier this year he got thrown out for something he didn’t even say.

If I knew fans could get managers ejected I could have changed the entire trajectory of last year’s playoff race by getting David Ross tossed from a few games.

Oh, well.

So what is Seiya to do? Should he start pissing and moaning at every close call that goes against him?

And are we sure that his English is good enough to pull it off?

I think it is more than good enough. He did an interview with ESPN a few weeks ago without his interpreter (whichever one he’s on now) and gave short answers, but he’s clearly able to carry on conversations in English. He doesn’t do most interviews without assistance and I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t talk to Bruce Levine without an interpreter. Not for me, for Bruce, but that’s beside the point.

And it’s not like Seiya would need to learn new phrases to do this. I’m sure he’s already heard this teammates yell, “That’s a bullshit call!” a few thousand times. (He’s also heard one teammate say, “Well, at least my wife is still a successful athlete.” But that won’t help him much in this case.)

Seiya could mix in a few more phrases to keep it fun.

“Have you got chickenshit in your eyes?” was good enough for Norman Dale, and it’s good enough for this.

If he doesn’t want to swear, “Have you EVER been good a job?” is a nice, clean burn for the umpires.

And I guess there’s an option that he could explore. I know, it’s crazy, but he might want to consider actually swinging at some of those pitches.

The idea that umpires are worse now than they’ve ever been is fueled mostly by two things. The fact that pitchers are throwing harder than ever giving those umpires less time to see the pitches and the fact that we all watch games at home with the strike zone drawn right on the screen.

I’m not one to defend umpires, but I do know the teams don’t think the TV strike zone box is all that accurate. Remember in the 2015 playoffs that TBS’ was off so badly that they had to admit it was wrong and said that they couldn’t fix it?

The one we see on Marquee or any other RSN (I think NBC Sports Chicago has one, but nobody’s watched that channel in at least year, so we can’t be sure) looks right, but it’s just some person in a truck adjusting a box based on where they think it should go.

Check out where they always put Nick Madrigal’s.

It’s not even up to his tiny little belt.

And then there are accounts like this one on Twitter that put out stats on umpires after each game.

Fine, but who watches the Watchmen? How do we know the people that do this are correct? We don’t.

But it’s not like umpires were any good at this before we had the technology to see how inaccurate they could be.

Here comes my old guy rant.

Back when I was a little kid the Cubs had guys like Bill Buckner and then Mark Grace who never struck out. How did they do that? Did umpires just call anything they didn’t swing at balls?

Maybe. It’s possible.

No! Guys like Buckner, Grace, Tony Gwynn and Keith Hernandez would “spoil” borderline pitches. When they got to two strikes they’d shorten their swings, choke up a little and if they thought a pitch was close they’d try to foul it off. They wouldn’t leave it up to the umpire. And back then, most of the umpires were morbidly obese. Some also still had the old chest protector that was a huge pad like a giant body pillow that had straps and they wore it in front of themselves behind the catcher.

“Nice pillow!” “Ahh, you’re drunk. You probably just want to curl up with it and barf on it.”

Between that and the fact they were eating hot dogs while calling pitches, it’s a wonder they ever got a pitch right.

Was it really that easy to spoil borderline pitches?

No. It was hard. That was the point, these guys were good at it. And, there is a 100 percent chance that I am exaggerating how often they did it. In my mind they did it a lot. In reality? Who knows? But I know they did it more than players do today. There was deep shame in striking out in those days. Nobody wanted to do it, and what they really didn’t want was to get rung up by the umpire. You’d wear the hair shirt for days if you let some myopic umpire decide your fate on a 2-2 pitch near the outside corner.

I also think that guys in the 70s grew mustaches for two reasons. One was to look like a porn star. The other was so that when they yelled at an umpire, remnants of things they ate for lunch and chewing tobacco would also fly out of their face at them.

I’m just full of unsubstantiated theories today.

Anyway, the point is that Seiya is a very good hitter. His skill is not just at knowing his strike zone. He makes excellent contact to all quandrants of the strike zone, and for his own good and that of the Cubs, he’s going to need to be willing to try to make excellent contact just a little bit beyond all four quandrants of the strike zone.

It’s great to be able to go back to the dugout after what you think was a bad call that did you wrong and look at the iPad and be proven correct. But you’re still out. There’s nothing you can do when an umpire has an egregious miss. But if you’re constantly taking pitches that are just a fraction outside of the zone, you really should be trying to hit those.

I kind of worry that now that Seiya is the Cubs primary DH with Cody Bellinger playing right field that Seiya’s going to actually be more selective because he’s got nothing to do between at bats but look at his at bats over and over on the iPad or back in the video room and obsess over that little rectangle that is supposed to depict the strike zone.

Seiya’s a helluva a hitter. He needs to accept the fact that he’s better at his job than the umpires are at theirs and take some of those at bats out of their hands and into his.

And, reminding them that they suck at their jobs on occasion wouldn’t hurt, either.