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This obscures the fact that umpires are worse than 93% when the pitch is close to the boundary of being a ball or a strike (shadow zone). Obvious balls and obvious strikes are obvious, but umpire accuracy when it is close is only 81%, and their accuracy was even worse 15 years ago.

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/strike-three-lets-check-in-on-um...

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Right, but as that article notes, the numbers show it's an average of 4.5 pitches per team in the shadow zone in each game. And those pitches are not clear-cut instances where players will be confident in challenging, more like 50/50. So what remains is how teams decide to let their players use this finite challenge resource.

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