Ok, I read this, on the disappearance of the crafty pitcher, by Neil Paine at fivethirtyeight, and I have a question.

Here it goes, Neil: Does this have anything to do with the use of pitch location tracking, especially by MLB for their umpires?

I remember noticing in particular the extended strike zone for Tom Glavine with the Braves. Greg Maddux wasn't as exaggerated, but Glavine's strike zone included low and outside (to right-handed pitchers) when he could get away with it.

This was noticeable because TBS would broadcast the Braves games, and we could also watch their opponents (Astros for me) on a different broadcast. The camera angles from the outfield were close, but just enough separated that I could watch replays of pitches from both angles.

The TBS cameras were located a little farther into left field than the away broadcast. Which meant that a pitch a ball or two wide on the low outside corner for a righthand batter looked to be in the strike zone on the TBS broadcast. But when you saw it from dead center through the dead center camera, you could see how wide of the plate it truly was.

Glavine knew how to expand the strike zone. A pitch that was a clear strike in the first inning was now a ball or two wider by the fifth inning, just because he would pound it over and over again, a little farther outside each time, until the umpire was calling the wide strike out of habit, as much as anything.

With a truer measurement of the strike zone, and the umpires aware of it, I wonder if this is possible to the same extent that it was? If so, a pitcher who knows how to use a little Penn and Teller magic on the umpire doesn't have the same freedom as they did a generation ago.