http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment...ra/379443/

Quote: baseball's growing tedium is a straightforward observation. Both home runs-per-game and runs-per-game are down about 20 percent from their early-2000s highs. Strikeouts are up about a fifth. In the last decade, the number of players slugging higher than .500 has collapsed from 45 to 15.

Defense wins championships, as coaches like to say, but offense wins sweeps. Fans aren’t tuning in to the Era of the Pitcher. Across a range of networks including Fox’s Saturday game, TBS, and ESPN, ratings have fallen by between 25 and 35 percent since baseball's collective hitting slump started in the middle of the last decade. ...

Yes, steroids pumped up offenses, and yes, the rules against steroids have deflated them. But something else happened in 2006—something that baseball fans rarely talk about when they bemoan the offensive state of baseball. It wasn’t something that baseball took away. It was, rather, something that baseball added.

A camera.

Umpiring the Umpires

On October 4, 2006, the Minnesota Twins hosted the Oakland Athletics in a first-round playoff game at the Metrodome. When the first pitch left Esteban Loaiza's fingers, a first-of-its-kind camera tracked the pitch’s speed, break, and location, and relayed the data points to broadcasters and online viewers. By 2008, cameras with this Pitch f/x technology were installed in every stadium, capturing 95 percent of all balls and strikes, according to Hardball Times.

Rather than deem the cameras a threat to league integrity, baseball embraced them. For years, Major League Baseball had been pressuring umpires to submit to performance standards. With the introduction of Pitch f/x, MLB finally had cameras in every stadium to umpire the umpires. In 2009, the league implemented a policy called Zone Evaluation (ZE), which tracked missed calls after each game and judged umpires by their accuracy. After ZE's first year, three senior umpires were fired for their mistakes behind the plate. Those with good performance could get promotions and earn up to $400,000.

Better incentives make better workers. As economist Edward Lazear has shown, organizations become more productive when a job well done is rewarded with extra money and dumb mistakes are punished. So we shouldn’t be surprised that, after the introduction of cameras, umpires have called the strike zone more consistently and more accurately each year since 2007, as Brian Mills explained in a brilliant paper.

I always thought the strike zone was too low. A pitch at the height of where the breastbone starts is not too high, it's perfect. How did the strike zone get so friggen low?

Two words: Eric Gregg

Checkout the GIFs at the bottom of this page.

Link.