New York – Three borderline ball-strike calls went against the Tigers and starting pitcher Jack Flaherty Tuesday night. And none were challenged.
It became part of the post-game discussion after the 10-2 loss to the Mets.
Two came in the same second inning at-bat with Mets’ MJ Melendez, the last was on a 3-2 pitch. Flaherty threw a pitch that landed in the strike zone box but was called a ball.
It was the difference between a strikeout to start the inning or a walk. A similar thing happened in the third inning. Flaherty threw a strike on a 2-2 pitch to leadoff hitter Bo Bichette that was called a ball.
Bichette singled on the next pitch.
“You can say good take,” Flaherty said after the game. “They were called balls and we should’ve taken advantage of the system we have in place.”
So why didn’t Flaherty or catcher Dillon Dingler challenge those calls? Dingler, who is 20-5 on challenges behind the plate, lost one earlier in the Melendez at-bat. The Tigers had just one challenge and eight innings left to play.
“It always makes you a little gun shy when you lose one early,” Dingler said. “I don’t know why I felt the need to do it that early, to be honest. But you try to minimize those because it makes everybody gun shy once you burn one.”
Some pitches are also tougher for catchers to make borderline judgments on. Remember, there’s no strike zone box for the pitchers and catchers. They are playing in real time and the truth is, Dingler didn’t get a clean look at the two pitches to Melendez.
“Those pitches I had to catch going back across my body,” Dingler said. “Where I don’t have a good idea of where it crosses (the plate). Those two that were strikes, one went up and in to down and away. The other went up and in to down and in. I can’t see that.
“If I had a better view, I would’ve challenged.”
Again, Dingler is among the best at making accurate challenges. He’s also so good at framing pitches that he can trick hitters into not challenging. The baseball data base Codify two days ago had the Tigers ranked fifth in baseball with 110 pitches that were outside the strike zone but called strikes and not challenged by the hitting team.
“I trust what (Dingler) does back there,” Flaherty said. “What he sees and what he feels, I trust him. He’s been really good with it all year. If I don’t see an immediate reaction from him on a pitch, I trust him. … I can’t really tell sometimes. Our catchers are so good, they fool me.”
Manager AJ Hinch was asked if he thought his team, hitters and catchers, were being aggressive enough with the ABS challenge system.
“The question is the confidence in and around the strike zone,” he said. “When you look back at plays, it’s always easy to say you should’ve used them. Or if you have some left at the end of the game, oh, you should’ve tried. That’s not how the system is set up to judge yourself.”
Hinch said he believes his team has become more confident with understanding where the strike zone is and the right moments to use a challenge.
“But as I say, there is no box like there is on TV,” he said. “There are pitches where you might flinch and don’t see it as well as you thought you did at the time. You look back and you question yourself. But you’d rather be safe than just waste a challenge.”
Dingler and Jake Rogers combined are 25-6 on reversing calls. That 81% success rate is the best in baseball. They’ve got five strikeouts on reversed calls. But those 31 challenges are the fourth lowest in baseball.
Does the success rate go down if the challenge rate goes up?
“You just don’t want to miss the egregious ones and we’ve missed a few of those,” Hinch said. “But we’ve also got some borderline ones that were one-tenth off. The art of the ABS is to reward the teams that know the strike zone the best.”
@cmccosky
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Detroit Tigers explain no challenges to pivotal pitches against Mets