When Chip Caray sees it.

I've also mentioned that there is a chance that the result of a play (base hit/out) could have a subconscious effect on how the scorer scores the hit type. Unless he can somehow get it in before he knows whether it will be caught or not (unlikely) that's a difficult potential bias to deal with.

i'll double post (hopefully this is not faux pas):

Peter said...
I think we’re missing something really important here - When do stringers move between parks?

If stringer A only scores at Wrigley field, then his perspective/parallax never changes. So he should always be judging under the same conditions.

If the ballpark moves the press box in the middle of a season, or if a stringer scores consecutive seasons in different stadiums with different perspectives (like shea/citi, oys/nys), then you might have a year-to-year issue.

but I hardly doubt there’s a contingent of mobile stringers hopping from stadium to stadium and having different judgements.

Now announcers who do jump from stadium to stadium, yes, it could affect the quality of the broadcast (that could be mitigated by good broadcasters who remember fenway is higher than citi). But overall, this should *not* affect stringers who stay in 1 park.

now, if you want to talk about multiple stringers scoring different games within the season and stringer A’s perception of a line drive differs from stringer B’s perception, then you’re on to something.

but I hardly doubt there’s a contingent of mobile stringers hopping from stadium to stadium and having different judgements.

Baltimore/DC has five stringers who split the games between the two ballparks.

Larry--

thinking about that again, you're right. they could be cross-scoring in say NY, OAK/SF, chicago, etc, assuming the teams let them (which, obviously, is the case in bal/dc)

but that goes to another commenter on the original site talking about small sample size - the only "valid" points are multi-stadium individual markets where they share stringers (and he was originally stating that there weren't enough points even with all the stadiums)

and it also goes to my comment about announcers: hopefully these guys would be cognizant of the differences between the 2 stadiums enough to alter accordingly.

but that still doesn't warrant a coast to coast statistical analysis (albeit a pretty sound one).

assuming the teams let them

The teams? We don't work for the teams, we work for MLBAM. Obviously we are there are the pleasure of the teams, but barring exceptional circumstances, the teams don't care who it is.

From experience, it is often hard to tell the difference between a line drive and fly ball at Nationals Park. We're waaaaaaaaaaay up there, so we're essentially looking down on the field from above, as an almost two-dimensional thing. It takes a while to learn to judge them there.

plim, I don't quite get what your point is. The theory is that scorers in different locations will have a different perspective of the same reality - the same ball will "look" different in different parks, despite being the same batted ball and having the same flight path. That creates a persistent bias - and would do so even if we were magically able to have all games scored by the exact same person.

CW--

the point is that if Larry sees a line drive in RFK, he's not going to misjudge pop fly in Wrigley because it's so much lower - because he would never score a game in wrigley. hopefully a scorer would get to know his home park(s) well enough to figure it out over time. but it's not like we have to have "park effects" for scorers in different parks for line drives vs fly balls - which is where i thought the article was eventually leading towards.

Also, all scorers at all stadiums in utilize replay, unless they are idiots.