I doubt this trend will change, since it really has been going on for 5+ years now... but hopefully someone at the Mariners or MLB has been made aware of this bias... and they are trying to do something about it.
The three to ten pitches a game going against the Mariners is really having an effect, as you write about for both hitters and pitchers above, and it will only get worse for the young kids as it wears upon them over the seasons... and the rumors travel through the organization and the league.
What I truly do not understand is why Mariners brain trust has not been more vocal about this - whether through the Bakers and Drayers of the world, or just through Wedge being told to get thrown out consistently over bad calls. The lack of fight by the brain trust is just so frustrating.
And just for the record, IF the brain trust is doing something behind the scenes that we do not know about... it ain't working! Do something to show your fans that you care about what is going on.
.
I guess Gordon has been high on Sucre's defense for a couple of years. Jack Zduriencik agrees. And it took Dr. D about four pitches to /cosign.
It's funny that Terry McD brought up the point of quietness just this last week. Sucre is as quiet as death when receiving the pitch. He holds up the target nice and high, palm "up," and he has the "clamshell" snap in which he yanks a high pitch down into the strike zone without moving his arm.
He receives the ball as pretty as a picture. He nods back at the pitcher and generally radiates the idea of, yep, we got this. He tosses the ball back in Eddie Perez style, hitting the pitcher softly in the glove at the same comfortable spot each time. (Framing isn't even Sucre's reputation; he's supposed to be a thrower and a game manager.)
On May 24, Sucre's debut, it took about two batters for Joe Saunders to get into a nice tempo and rhythm. I'm thinking, okayyyyyy.
At the end of the first inning, Lance Berkman (!) was at the plate, and the count was 3-and-2. Saunders threw the 3-and-2 pitch about one baseball's width low ... Sucre, body perfectly still, used his big pleasant catcher's glove to snag the ball "moving his glove toward the strike zone," visibly "pulling" the pitch.
The ump rang Berkman up.
.
Berkman was well-and-truly ticked off, argued hard, right in the first inning. Which kind of implies that he was shocked to see a 3-and-2 pitch, two inches low, called against him. This is consistent with my assumption that opposing batters are into a nice little "rhythm" of expecting to get sweeet strike zones against Mariner pitchers.
............
Right then and there, Dr. D realized we would have the answer to our question: do Mariners catchers not get calls because they're lousy at getting calls? Or do they not get calls because they're Mariners?
If it's the former, then Jesus Sucre would get one whale of a lot more calls than Mariner catchers have been getting. If it's the latter, then he wouldn't.
............
As the game went on, I had the subjective impression that the umpire stopped giving calls around the 3rd inning -- as if he stopped and remembered, no, hold it, this is the Seattle Mariners against the Texas Rangers; I can't be giving calls to the Mariners. That's probably just my imagination - seriously, it was probably my "flinch" that caused me to see it that way.
So we have an objective way to get data on it; we've got the strike zone results on the internet these days. I typed all of this, up to this point, without checking Brooks.
Lemme go check it. Sucre has caught two games, the 24th and 26th, Saunders and Iwakuma.
.............
Here is the "combo plot" from Brooks, the whole game on the 24th - you probably want to pull it up in its own window:
Again, apples to apples and SP vs SP ... here is Iwakuma's strike zone chart that night: And here is Tepesch's strike zone chart: .......... Leaving us where? Sucre has pulled two or three low balls up for strikes in each game. With that asterisk, the bias against the Mariners' starters has appeared to be unchanged so far. Certainly Iwakuma deserves a whale of a lot better than he's getting out there. When the M's batters are at the plate? You wouldn't expect Sucre to affect that, and he hasn't. Umps remain ready to ring up M's batters at every opportunity. This of course changes the entire flow of the batter-pitcher matchups, if the batter knows he'd better be swinging at anything close. It's just two games. We thought you might like the information. Maybe Sucre's drop-dead gorgeous pitch framing will begin to tell as time goes on. In any case, Sucre's results will answer -- for me -- the question of whether it's been the umpires' fault, or the Mariners. Given the bias the Mariners' HITTERS have faced, I think I know the answer already. But we'll see. Cheers, Dr Dven to Sucre, all of them quite low
Comments
What we need to do, is to have someone write an article on how to do the research on which pitch FX website for past games, and then create a Xcel spreadsheet that would record the bad calls - who it happened to, who was catching / pitching, the game situation (outs, score, base runners), where the pitch was per normal strike zone and the now expected lefty and righty strike zones (on the line, in the zone, just outside) and etc...
There are enough guys on this site that we all could then do the work of recording the results for a couple months, and we would have doubled or triple checked our work for each game for the past 3 to 5 years.
Then we would all know the truth, and how rampant this is.
And that's ALL this is. What if it's a "Don't Mess With The Yankees" thing? The changeup at the last minute in the first Montero deal in 2011, going with Smoak from the Rangers instead. The Montero deal that was ultimately completed before the 2012 season, shortly after which Pineda was declared out for the season. Yankees brass decides not to get mad but get even? Throws it's influence around at the highest levels of MLB?
Of course it could just be no true conspiracy, just a complete disrespect of the organization.
But I didn't always feel as strongly about the M's and biased umpiring EXCEPT when it came to the Yankees. Any time the M's faced them you could see it plain as day. Now the last few years it seems to have become a consistent factor against most every team.
What I would like to see is a skilled analyst have access to the data and produce team-by-team and umpire-by-umpire. MLB would do everything they could to make this inaccessible, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to see it. Is it just the M's? Is it all bottom-of-the-barrell franchises? Are there teams that get consistent "plus" treatment, and if so are there things they have in common that might indicate any factors that make this likely?