San Francisco announcers and fans questioned the strikes umpire Seth Buckminster called during Brian Wilson’s 8th inning appearance against the Giants. Then again, Buckminster’s strike zone puzzled observers for most of the game.

The lefty aces for the Giants and Doders both missed out on called third strikes in the fourth inning. Madison Bumgarner thought he struck out Scott Van Slyke:

gif hover by FreezeFrame

But it was a ball, and Van Slyke doubled a few pitches later.

Hyun-Jin Ryu gave an epic grimmace after Buckminster wouldn’t ring up Buster Posey in bottom of the 4th inning.

Modeling Buckminster’s strike zone from the game suggests he was stingy on the corners, particularly up and away to lefties.

Caveats to this chart:

• the data are 263 pitches that were not hit in play, but includes foul balls, which are consiered strikes (lookin at you, Pablo Sandoval)
• the chart draws an approximate rule book strike zone following the approach described in [Analyzing Baseball Data with R](https://github.com/maxtoki/baseball_R/blob/master/scripts/Chap7.ballstrikes.R#L97) by using the average height of MLB players and the width of home plate
• the chart is from the catcher's point of view

Chart code on GitHub

Enter B-Weez, who made a grumpy Panda…

… then got an elusive outside strike from Buckminster against Buster Posey.

PitchFX put those pitches within the rulebook strike zone but also inside the toss-up regions of Buckminster’s strike zone.

Recreating Buckminster’s “called strike” probability chart with only Wilson’s pitches makes a shapes like this:

So Buckminster totally fears the beard.

Baseball Savant umpire data shows Buckminster calls balls on 4.89% of pitches in the strike zone, which appears to be among the top 10-ish in the difficult-to-read chart.

The Analyzing Baseball Data with R blog also has a post breaking down umpire tendencies.

FWIW the Sandoval and Posey pitches were on 3-1 and 2-0 counts, respectively.