I love ESPN’s coverage of baseball. I love Jon Miller. I even liked Joe Morgan (or at least didn’t hate him) the last couple of years. I love Bobby Valentine this year. I love the Sunday Night Baseball music. I love the games. Sunday Night Baseball is often one of those little things that I look forward to each week, but I hate “K Zone.”
K Zone, the floating box that is supposed to tell you where in the strike zone a pitch crossed the plate or where it missed by, is theoretically not the worst idea on earth (although it’s not far off). In practice, K Zone sucks. It is frustratingly inaccurate, incredibly distracting and entirely stupid. The announcers, probably because they’re instructed to, seem to trust K Zone implicitly and by doing so make themselves sound like idiots. The zone doesn’t seem to understand breaking balls and more often than not (it seems) is way off in its representation of where a ball travels.
I have yet to meet a single person who knows the game of baseball (player, coach, ex-anything) that finds K Zone helpful in any way. The general complaint is that it in addition to being just plain wrong, K Zone doesn’t show the intricacies of calling balls and strikes. Often pitchers who are consistently around the zone will get the benefit of the doubt on close pitches and strikes outside the zone if they hit the catcher’s target. Conversely, pitchers who are wild often don’t get borderline calls to go their way. This is not a concept that K Zone understands.
Perhaps for novice baseball watchers the K Zone is tolerable, but for anyone who knows anything about anything baseball, K Zone is a pain and way way way more trouble than it’s worth.
-Max Frankel
