r/baseball • u/briankennyMLB Brian Kenny • May 21 '16

Brian Kenny - Impromptu AMA

Jumping back in...all baseball topics. Let's do it... New K zone, robot umps, silly auto-IBB rule, OPS+ is awesome..etc..

153 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

252 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-11

u/[deleted] May 21 '16

Because we enjoy the sport

62

u/briankennyMLB Brian Kenny May 21 '16

You enjoy bad calls? I don't get it.

-16

u/FatGuyANALLIttlecoat Boston Red Sox May 21 '16

Someone like Greg Maddux, who made a career out of stretching the zone by fooling the batters and umpires, would never make it out of AAA level baseball.

12

u/kuhanluke St. Louis Cardinals May 22 '16

Greg Maddux made a career out of locating pitches.

-4

u/FatGuyANALLIttlecoat Boston Red Sox May 22 '16 edited May 22 '16

And a lot of those were locating it 2-4" out of the strikezone in the 4th, 5th, 6th, because he was working both the ump and the hitter.

EDIT I'm not wrong. He was a finesse pitcher and part of his job was fooling umps by stretching the fucking strikezone. Have none of you watched him pitch? He'd hit the black in the first, and move further out. Part of his mystique was getting batters to swing at clear balls because he'd trick the ump into calling pitches 4" out of the zone strikes. He's keep locating on the black, but keep moving a tad and a tad and a tad out, such that the ump wouldn't notice him moving just a centimeter off the black--come the fifth, and he's three inches off and it's a strike. Maddux with an auto-ump is a B+ pitcher. Maddux with a human ump is the most skilled (talent =/= "skill") pitcher of all time, hands down, no comparison.

3

u/LaFlamaBlanca1 May 22 '16

Maybe he wouldn't have been an all time great but to say he would have been a AAA pitcher is ridiculous.