Watching sports these days is getting way too cluttered

It’s been three years, and I’ve finally had enough.

If anybody with ESPN is reading, please, I implore you, get rid of the strike zone box on your baseball broadcasts.

It’s called the “K-Zone,” and it began with the Cardinals-Cubs game in early April 2015. A roughly square box graphic superimposed above home plate that stretches from either side of the plate and roughly parallel to each hitter’s midsection.

The box moves as the hitter crouches or stands more erect and is touted as representing the true, strike zone. Whatever that is.

Technically, the strike zone is defined as the volume of space above home plate between a hitters knees and the middle of the torso. In practice, everyone knows this tends to fluctuate since it’s a human being — the umpire — that makes the determination on whether or not the ball passes through this zone.

And, umpires have been known to favor specific pitches as strikes. Some are more apt to call pitches that are low, even sometimes out of the zone, strikes. Others will give more leeway on the edges of the plate, even off the plate.

It’s nice to be able to know where the technical strike zone is, but continuously on every, single pitch? This is what ESPN’s K-Zone does.

When the K-Zone premiered, it did so to fan disapproval. Some of those early tweets can’t be repeated here, but the network stuck with it. And fans still don’t care for it.

It’s distracting. You don’t see a line tracing a quarterback’s throw in real-time during a football game, or a base hit during a baseball game.

We don’t get graphics showing where linemen are going to block as they line up for the snap. So why do we need to see the strike zone on each and every pitch?

ROOT Sports approaches the strike zone in a less obtrusive way for its Mariners broadcasts. The zone isn’t superimposed until after the pitch, allowing the viewer the enjoyment of the moment in real time, followed with a description of what we just saw.

For the baseball purist, we pretty much know where the strike zone is as the pitcher goes into his stretch and delivery. It’s the umpire’s mindset that is often the mystery.

Perhaps there’s a way for ESPN to tap into the mind of the various umpires, and superimpose strike zones showing where their tendencies to call balls and strikes are, rather than a generic strike zone based on what would ideally be a strike.

I know, I know. Progress, right?

I grew up in an era when replay itself was a new and wonderful part of each telecast. Now, it’s become part of the actual games. Go figure.

It used to be that watching a sports broadcast was about as close to being at the game as you could get — sans the smells, sounds and peripheral sights. Now, with up-to-the-minute scores in one corner of the screen, a sports news ticker trolling across the bottom, and other graphics too small to read from 15 feet away without a monitor the size of your wall taking up most of the space, there’s barely any room left for the actual picture of the action.

And now, that is cluttered up with the K-Zone. I guess it’s all the more reason to get out, and go to a game.

John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.