So, after mentioning the poor job yesterday, I feel obliged to mention the great job today. For the most part (and dealing with much more difficult pitches to call, Knucklers aren't easy), Darryl Cousins called a fantastic game.

There was a lot of griping both from the booth (Buck and McCarver) and from certain message boards that the Strikezone was unnecessarily tight and that Pettitte was getting squeezed.

To this, I say, look at this graph:


Honestly, with a few bad calls up in favor of the Yankees and one call inside in favor of Boston, the Strikezone was textbook all game, with pitches called as they should have been called, according to the locations tracked by PitchFX. Basically the only bad spot in the zone was the bottom right corner, and it was a consistent non-call. Other than that, the edges look very clean and sharp.

I'm also going to let you all in on a little secret: I do not have magic abilities to generate these maps, you can do it too! Select a game and pitcher with my PitchFX Tool and then click "Create a Normalized Strikezone Map". You will get a page like this one, which will show you all calls made on each team's pitching staff. Really, next time before you complain about the strike zone, check out the PitchFX data first, you might be surprised. The camera angle put on by most broadcasts really distorts your view of where the pitch ended up.

I would also be remiss not to mention that Justin Masterson got absolutely shelled today. Why, you ask?

Well, let me clear that up:


You can't be a sinkerballer looking for a ground ball and throw belt or higher pitches to Major League hitters and expect good results. It just doesn't work to leave pitches out over the plate.