QuesTec

Anyone who follows baseball as often as me knows about the whole controversy involving Questec. And anyone with as skeptical an ear as me know that they're being bullshitted when QuesTec is being declared by the umpires as just slightly less injust than the Jim Crow laws. Derek Zumsteg has a pretty good article on it over at Baseball Prospectus, but a premium subscription is required. (If you have a premium subscription, I can't recommend Zumsteg's articles enough) He does, though, link to this article written by the Baseball Prospectus people at ESPN.com in June, and it includes this rather informative blurb by Rob Neyer:

Last summer, the World Umpires Association asked Robert K. Adair, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Physics at Yale University, to study QuesTec's PitchTrax system.

And that's the last we heard of Adair and the World Umpires Association.

Why? Because the World Umpires Association didn't like what Adair told them he found.

Fortunately, Adair didn't mind sharing his findings when we spoke recently.

"I've looked at it intelligently," Adair said, "from the viewpoint of somebody who looks at data with some degree of precision, and I seriously doubt that anyone else has.

"There are problems, but it's a pretty good system. They have a limited amount of money. To get the last bugs out of a system can be very expensive, but it's not a bad system."

The umpires have complained that QuesTec's system isn't consistent. Not so, says, Adair.

"The umpire's strike zone and the QuesTec strike zone are consistent, but in different ways. The umpires' strike zone is much wider than home plate: at least a ball width on the outside corner, and half a ball on the inside. And the umpires' strike zone is smaller by a ball and a half at the bottom, and half a ball at the top."

Meanwhile, the QuesTec strike zone does closely mirror the strike zone defined in the rulebook. It's true that the zone must be adjusted up and down for each batter, but Adair says the operators generally do a good job making those adjustments. What's more, while a certain number of pitches do give incorrect readings, "Operators are given leave to kick those out, and typically they tend to throw out six or seven pitches per game."

There's nothing like a bit of objectivity to spice up a debate.