Strike Zone too low? Check the rule. And what the heck is the "hollow beneath the kneecap"?

Too many strike outs?  Supposedly the strike zone is lower than ever.  Maybe part of the problem is that even after all these years, the strike zone is not well defined.

http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/downloads/y2013/official_baseball_rules.pdf

horizontal midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap ... determined from the batter's stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.
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Which knee?  The diagram on the next page (22) shows a dotted horizontal line behind both knees on the catcher side labelled hollow beneath the kneecap.  This suggests that the back knee is used but it is not explicit.

And the diagram shows the mid point line not mid way between the top of the shoulders and top of the pants but closer to the top of the pants.

And what part of the ball at either top or bottom on the vertical definition of the imaginary strike zone?  For the horizontal part of the strike zone it's a strike if any part of the ball merely touches a vertical line up from the edge of the plate.  The ball may merely be tangent to the edge of the plate to be a strike.  Since the ball is about 2.25 inches in diameter that means that about 4.5 inches is added to the 17 inches of the plate in defining the width of the strike zone: about 21.5 inches, quite a bit more.

Does tangent also apply to the vertical part of the strike zone?  At the bottom is it a strike if the top of the ball merely touches the bottom of the hollow beneath the kneecap?

And where the heck is this hollow beneath the kneecap?  Isn't the hollow behind the kneecap?  What the heck?

The strike zone is really stupid.  Thursday, May 8, 2014

The strike zone is IMAGINARY!  You cannot touch it.  Yes, you can touch the plate but the plate does not touch the strike zone.  And the strike zone is three dimensional.

It varies from one batter to another.  It can even vary for one batter if the batter changes his stance.

It varies only in height, not width.  What sense does that make?  If its variance is supposed to accommodate batters of different sizes, shouldn't that include width?
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