but it’s actually extraordinary. Let’s take a trip.

*_<

Baseball always looks noticeably different than it used to, and two forces explain most of its changes: Maximization and disruption.

Maximization is: Once a strategy is known to be good, players and teams sell out pursuing that strategy, generation building on generation. If a tactic is found to support the strategy, the tactic spreads. “Strike the other team out a lot” is one such strategy, and “throw harder,” “throw more secondary pitches that can get chase,” “get taller pitchers,” “teach extension,” “prioritize fastball rise instead of sink,” and “get catchers who can frame” are tactics in support. The league’s strikeout rate—and its fastball velocity, its rate of secondary pitches thrown, its catchers’ framing performances, its whiff rate, its batting average, even its rates of catcher’s interferences and pitchouts and triples and hit-by-pitches and complete games—are all pretty much unrecognizable compared to even a quarter-century ago, because “strike the other team out a lot” is a universal strategy. And thus baseball changes.

Disruption is: One thousand players playing tens of thousands of games against each other year after year will tend toward an equilibrium. When even a small change is forced into the system—by changes to equipment or environment, by rules changes, by expansion—the equilibrium wobbles and everybody runs around trying to find the new tactics to maximize. A tiny tweak to the seams of the ball in mid-2015 increased home runs by—at juiced-ball peak—60 percent, which led to hitters changing their swings to take advantage, which led to pitchers altering their repertoires to counter these swing changes, which led to the league’s rules committee deciding baseball had gotten too static and needed more stolen bases. And then a decades-long decline in stolen bases (maximization) was entirely undone by one tweak to the rules (disruption), which probably led to innovations in sliding (maximization), etc and so on, and thus baseball changes.

There’s a third force, as well. It’s also very powerful, but it mostly holds baseball together, limits change. We can call that force “63.5.” That’s roughly the rate of pitches that are strikes, leaguewide. And for some reason, despite all the changes catalogued above, and dozens of other changes that I could name—universal DH, the rise and the banning of the infield shift, the spread and the banning of performance-enhancing drugs, sabermetrics, two expansions and then a long expansion drought, Coors Field, Statcast, the decline of small ball, ABS—that number barely moves.

In 2001, the league’s strike rate—either called strikes, or balls swung at—was 63.0 percent. This year, the league’s strike rate is 63.7 percent. In the 24 seasons in between, the league’s strike rate has never strayed far from 63.5, never a full percentage point higher or lower.

Since 1988, in fact, the strike rate has only really changed once. That happened when MLB introduced the QuesTec system in 2001 to monitor and standardize umpiring, causing the biggest jump in called-strike rates in history, a very big disruption. Before QuesTec the average strike rate was only 61.8 percent. But it was just as steady before QuesTec as it has been since QuesTec. In the 11 years that preceded QuesTec, the league’s strike rate never moved more than 0.4 percentage points in either direction.

So the strike rate can change, but it is extremely resistant to it.

*_<

There’s a lot about this that’s interesting to me.

ONE
is that this number, this sturdy, unchanging, unresponsive number, is so complex that it seems like it could/should be really volatile. When a pitch fails to be a strike, it could be that the pitcher couldn’t throw one (skill), or that he didn’t really want to throw one (tactics), and/or that the batter didn’t swing at a pitch that the pitcher wanted him to chase (cost of living in a society).

You might predict that these three variables would produce a strike rate that’s in complete, haphazard flux, unpredictable and equilibrium-defying, baseball’s three-body problem. In mid-2015, for example, the league started playing with a much livelier ball. Homer-hitting went crazy. We might assume that Variable 1 (pitcher skill) would stay the same, but hypothesize that Variable 2 (pitcher tactics) would change dramatically in response. Pitchers would be scared to go in the zone, since balls in play had become much more damaging. They would nibble, their strike rate would go down, batters would be ahead in the count more, which would enable them to make better decisions and hit the ball even harder, which would cause pitchers to be even more scared, the whole thing would spiral, the planet would get sucked into one of the suns. What actually happened to the strike rate is: Nothing. It stayed basically the same, as it always does.

That’s just one example. You could spin off a thousand scenarios where one might hypothesize that the strike rate could veer wildly. But it never happens. The leaguewide strike rate at Coors Field, the worst place in the world to pitch? You guessed it. Somehow, in the 19 years I have data for, it’s 63.5 percent.

TWO
is that strike rate somehow hasn’t succumbed to the forces of maximization.

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Only three.

Last year I defined a Five-Star Little League Home Run thusly:

Generally speaking, a five-star LLHR will criss-cross. There will be at least two and probably three or more redirections, and ideally those redirections will be at different angles, creating something crooked.

Just under 2 percent of LLHRs qualified for five stars. This easily meets all the criteria for five stars. If there were ever to be a Six-Star Little League Home Run, it might be this one:

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All numbers are through Sunday’s games.

1. First-pitch-of-the-game swinging/First-pitch-of-the-game grooving
Batters are going to swing at the first pitch of the game. That’s not going to change now. They’re swinging more than twice as often as they used to, they’re hitting tons of dingers, they’re on pace to set a new first-pitch-of-the-game dingers record, they’re loving it:

So for now we can count on the hitter’s side of this. The ongoing question is whether the pitchers will adjust, or whether we’ve found the one situation in all of sports where professional athletes simply don’t care about getting humiliated.

If pitchers were to adjust, we’d expect them to be less predictable (throw things other than fastballs) and less hittable (throw things other than pitches in the middle of the strike zone). Let’s see:

Fastball rate, first pitch of the game,

• 2010-2019: 92 percent

• 2020-2025: 93 percent

• 2026: 92 percent

Heart-of-zone rate, first pitch of the game,

• 2010-2019: 32 percent

• 2020-2025: 33 percent

• 2026: 30 percent

Still throwing all fastballs. Maybe a little more cautious with the fastball. I’ll be convinced when more than one half of 1 percent of games start with a changeup.

2. The end of no-hitters/the eventual elevation of complete games to no-hitteresque hero status
Last year was the first year since 2005 without a true, non-combined no-hitter in the majors. There hasn’t been one this year. If that holds, it would be the first two-season gap since the hinky WWII seasons. There’s obviously nothing impossible about no-hitters—Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Parker Messick both took bids into the ninth inning this year before allowing hits—but as more bids get interrupted by pitch count, there are just a lot fewer late-game attempts. So even though pitchers give up fewer hits than almost any time in history, the no-hitter is getting rarer.

There have been nine interrupted no-hitters this year—a starting pitcher going at least 70 pitches1 before being removed from an active no-hitter—which pro-rates to 20 over a full season. That would be a record. That would be as many as all of AL/NL history through the year 2003.

“The end of no-hitters” was the extent of my original proposal, but lately I’ve started to think we’re moving toward an era where simple complete games become the equivalent of no-hitters. Just as “140 pitches” got replaced by “120 pitches,” and then “120 pitches” got replaced by “100 pitches,” “100 pitches2” has now been replaced by “90 pitches.” Drew Rasmussen got pulled from a start the other day after 84 pitches; his line was 7/1/0/0/0/9. Logan Gilbert got pulled from a start after 87 pitches, with a 6/1/0/0/0/9 line. Kris Bubic: 7/2/0/0/1/11, 83 pitches. Max Meyer: 7/1/0/0/1/7, 83 pitches. There are dozens of starts like this. You can’t dominate more than those guys, and you can barely dominate more efficiently than those guys, but they’re still pulled after six or seven.

There are, meanwhile, only seven complete games this year, and six of them are shutouts. That last detail—I’m breathless. In Justin Verlander’s first season in the majors, there were 104 starters who were allowed to go nine innings in a non-shutout. In what might be Verlander’s final season, there has so far been one.

We used to have the shutout, an elevated subsection of complete games. But now complete games and shutouts are almost synonymous. We used to have the Maddux, an elevated subsection of complete games. But increasingly, complete games have to be Madduxes to have any shot. We used to have no-hitters, a rarefied subsection of complete games. But in 10, 20 years, there might not be a difference. To throw a complete game might well require perfection.

Creeping sign of this: The way pitchers celebrate the last outs of their complete games is edging toward the way they used to celebrate the last outs of no-hitters:

3. The Catcher’s Interference Frenzy

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I’d forgotten what the trade in question was. Turns out it was one that R.J. Anderson, in his Transaction Analysis for Baseball Prospectus at the time, called “the weirdest seven-player trade you'll see this year.” The headline pieces, such as they were, had a pleasant symmetry:

Out went: Álex Torres, a 26-year-old reliever with 66 career innings
In came: Brad Boxberger, a 26-year-old reliever with 50 career innings
Out went: Jesse Hahn, a 24-year-old starting pitching prospect on the cusp of debuting in the majors
In came: Matt Andriese, a 24-year-old starting pitching prospect on the cusp of debuting in the majors

Hahn had more upside, Andriese was safer; Boxberger was right-handed with flashier stuff while Torres was left-handed with a good full season under his belt. You could debate priorities, but the Padres seemed to get the more desirable pair by a sliver.

The cost of dealing with the Rays is what they require to close such slivers. There were three more pieces in the trade, all going to Tampa Bay: a cartoonishly large minor league reliever; a 21-year-old minor league infielder the Rays would convert to catching; and a generic utility player, who was entering his age-27 year after three fairly bad seasons in the majors. The reliever did nothing. The converted catcher did nothing. The generic utility player was Logan Forsythe, who would produce 9 WAR over the next three season for the Rays. They would eventually trade him for a top-50 starting pitching prospect.

The Padres got 1.1 WAR out of the trade. The Rays got 13.4.

*

We’re 12 years on.

In the 10 years that followed that tweet, there were 78 trades involving a) the Rays and b) at least one player who was already in the majors at the time of the trade. Some of you might immediately clock that the latter is a VERY important qualifier, because it eliminates the Rays’ trade of Cristopher Sánchez—in a MiLB for MiLB swap—and the Rays’ trade for Junior Caminero in another. Those were franchise-changing moments for both the Phillies and the Rays, as it turns out, but they’re not really what we’re talking about here, because there was nothing Raysy about those trades.

Raysy trades are:

• Trading a moderately expensive big leaguer for a whole bunch of less expensive big leaguers or potential big leaguers—spinning one year of club control into 18 or so—even when the Rays themselves are competing, not rebuilding;

• Somehow sneaking into a three-party deal to pick up an infielder or reliever, seemingly without giving up anything at all and perhaps without anybody noticing;

• Getting a so-so first baseman or DH for hecka cheap because those types of guys are always getting squeezed off other rosters;

• Or making tiny trades from areas of depth, usually for someone that offers more flexibility.

I wouldn’t confidently claim to remember all 78 of those trades’ details well—words like “Brad Miller” and “Ji-man Choi” have undergone a certain amount of context collapse in my brain—but most of them fall into one of those categories. Occasionally, as well, the Rays will be classic buyers, offering future value for something immediate.

Circa 2014, the consensus was that the Rays seemed to always be able to win the projected-WAR math. So let’s add up some WARs, and let’s call the winners. (Acknowledgment of the ridiculous oversimplication of what we’re about to do in this footnote:1

Seventy-eight trades:

• Trades “won” by the Rays: 44

• Trades “lost” by the Rays: 32

• 0 WAR to 0 WAR: 2

It’s silly to assign W’s in trades like Mike Brosseau (0.1 WAR in 200 at-bats for the Brewers) for Evan Reifert (hasn’t reached the majors). So let’s count only trades with margins of at least 1.5 WAR in one direction or the other:

• Trades won: 27

• Trades lost: 20

And

• Total WAR gained: 230

• Total WAR lost: 173

That’s not the blowout I was afraid of, but you do, in fact, gotta hand it to them: They were trading three nickels for two dimes all along. Smart.

I’m not even giving the Rays extra credit here for saving money—I presume they saved a bunch of money, they almost always do—because that’s none of my business. And while I have, in the past, worried that building an entire team out of proverbial Ben Williamsons capped their ceiling, their 2020-2021 run (making the World Series one year, winning 100 games the other) shut me up.

Let’s see the most valuable trades, in either direction:

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Based on recent history, the chances are around 50-50 that on Friday Jacob Misiorowski is going to throw the fastest pitch ever thrown by a starting pitcher. He first broke that record in his April 25 start (102.7 mph), then topped his own records on May 1 (103.0), May 8 (103.6), June 6 (103.7) and June 12 (104.5)—five new records1 in a span of nine starts.

Don’t just turn on the game at random if you want to see it. Since May 1, when Misiorowski made the leap from really good to literally the most dominant pitcher of all-time, his starts have followed a predictable pattern. He begins the first couple innings throwing almost nothing but fastballs. With those long limbs, extreme extension, and history of scattered wildness, you get the sense that his early-game project is just to calibrate himself, by keeping things very simple: One grip, one release point, one line, until he’s sure he’s not wild that day.

Spamming fastballs to the top of the order can be risky, though. So he throws his very best fastballs. That’s when you see the 103s and 104s.

And then, a couple innings in, he starts bringing in other pitches, at which point the fastball backs off a bit. It’s as though he’s more cautious with it once the cognitive task of pitching—toggling between grips and arm angles and locations—gets more challenging. So the fastball starts games at max, then drops a bit, and he holds it there:

But late in games he often synthesizes: He uses all his pitches and the velo starts ticking back up2. This suggests the 103s were always there if he wanted them, but he’d chosen restraint. Of the 30 hardest fastballs he’s thrown this year, 27 came in the first 25 pitches of the game. The three exceptions were pitches 92, 93 and 94 of their respective games.

From roughly pitch 26 through roughly pitch 90, the hitters get a little bit of a break.

🔥

It’s not nearly the respite you might expect. Depending on how you measure it, Misiorowski is either barely worse when his velo drops during the middle innings, or he’s not worse at all.

Here, for example, are his stats based on times through the order, since May 1:

• First time through: .088/.139/.088

• Second time through: .130/.167/.159

• Third time through: .095/.174/.095

The lowest OPS any pitcher has ever allowed—minimum 50 innings—was Craig Kimbrel’s .126/.186/.172 in 2012, and Misiorowski has been better than that in his relatively weaker second and third trips through.

By Statcast’s Run Values, which give credit for balls and strikes instead of just outcomes, there’s even less of a drop from the first time through to the next:

• First time through: 4.0 Runs/100 pitches

• Second and third time through: 3.9 Runs/100

If Misiorowski’s fastball is what makes him so special, then why doesn’t taking 2 mph off his fastball affect hitters’ chances?

🔥🔥

Part of it is surely that batters have to worry about more pitch types the second and third times through. (Since May 1, he’s about 80 percent fastballs in the first inning, 70 percent in the second, and 60 percent after that.) But I think the more important answer is that Misiorowski’s fastest fastballs are faster than they need to be. Beyond a certain point, a batter is simply beat. If a pitcher threw, say, 400 mph, it wouldn’t really matter whether he dropped to 398. I think Misiorowski has reached that point, and that point is around 101.

“But other people have thrown 101,” you say, “and they still give up hits.” But Misiorowski’s fastball, even at the relatively lower speeds, consistently outperforms its velocity.

When he throws 104, he’s unique. When he drops down to 102, there are other pitchers throwing as hard as him. But his 102 is more dominating than others’ 102. His 101 is more dominating than others’ 101. His 99 is more dominating than others’ 993. Mostly this is because, besides being large, he dives toward the plate for maximum extension:

Only three pitchers in the PITCHf/x era have even gotten more extension than Misiorowski does, and two of those guys—Carter Capps and Jordan Walden—were doing that freaky jump-drag delivery that you might remember hating. His fastest pitch was 104.5 mph, but he has thrown 138 pitches with a perceived velocity of at least 104.5. (His fastest perceived velocity was 107.5.)

🔥🔥🔥

Another way of appreciating that Misiorowski throws harder than is strictly necessary is by seeing what happens when he throws a meatball. A good pitch is a combination of stuff and location. If you set the location bar to zero, then the stuff bar has to be maxed out to merely survive.

Since May 1, Misiorowski has thrown 46 middle-middle fastballs. Of those 46:

• 40 strikes (15 taken, 15 fouled, 10 whiffs)

• 4 outs in play

• 2 singles

One of those singles was, perhaps, the exception to prove the rule. It came on the slowest Mis fastball of them all, a mere 98 mph. When Misiorowski lets his fastball drop to 98, he does start to get hittable. But 98 is way down the list for him.

🔥🔥🔥🔥

Something I’ve been thinking about for a long time is: In the NBA, there are guys who shoot 60 percent from the free throw line and guys who shoot 90 percent from the free throw line, with a relatively normal distribution between those points. It’s a controlled shot. Some people have a lot of control, some people don’t.

You’d say the same about pitchers: Some pitchers have a lot of control and some pitchers don’t. But the distribution of strike rates among pitchers is way, way narrower than it is for NBA free throw shooters. Last year, among 110 qualifying pitchers, all but one were between 61 percent strikes and 68 percent strikes4. That’s pretty insane to me. Some guys are super wild and some are super commandy, and yet across 100 pitches all of them (except one) fall within a seven-strike range. Where are the 80 percent strike throwers? Why have we never had an 80 percent strike thrower?

Some part of it is that pitchers are afraid to throw too many strikes. They’re incentivized to pitch carefully, to avoid the middle of the zone, to avoid the zone entirely with certain pitches and in certain counts. The reason there are no 80 percent strike throwers is that every pitcher is either too wild or too scared.

The one qualifying pitcher last year who was not between 61 and 68 percent was Tarik Skubal, who was at 70 percent, a bona fide outlier. Last August, Dallas Braden recounted a conversation he’d had with Skubal:

“The point Skubal made was, I know what my stuff looks like, I know how it plays. It’s 100 mph. Good luck. He understands the margin for error that comes along with his stuff, so why would he be out there doing anything other than try to attack the strike zone?”

Jacob Misiorowski was really good before May 1. Since then he has thrown harder, and he’s thrown more strikes, and those strikes have moved closer to the center of the strike zone5, and now he’s the best pitcher we’ve ever seen over a six-week stretch. When you’re watching him on Friday, you can also appreciate it when he mixes in a nasty slider or paints the inside corner And you can fantasize about what he might still do in the future, like add a sinker6. But at this point, it’s not clear he needs to do anything but throw four-seam fastballs for strikes and smile when he’s walking off the mound.

and Dad asks if I understand what all of that graphic is supposed to be showing. I say that of course I do. (Being home turns me back into a psychological teenager, so of course I understand everything.) Before I can explain any of it, the graphic is over and disappears.

I’ve probably seen those graphics… oh, 2,000 times since broadcasts started using them around 2021. But the truth is, I don’t ever really look at them. The truth is, I might only kind of understand them—not well enough to know how to make them work for me. So this is me trying to answer one father’s persistent question, and figure out why this beautiful and awesome and energy-intensive thing is not quite accomplishing what it’s supposed to for either of us.

Pt. 1: What it shows

This graphic shows ~four things, in increasing complexity—

Complexity Level 1: What types of pitches the pitcher throws, and how often he throws them. This is all written in the text box to the side, the 2D part of the graphic. Those usage rates then flip over to display something else about each pitch type, sometimes average pitch velocity, sometimes slugging percentage or batting average against:

Complexity Level 2: Where each pitch type is thrown most often. Each zooming 3D baseball lands in the part of the zone that the pitcher hits most often with each pitch type.

In the case of the Blake Snell graphic, at the top of this article, we see a tidy narrative, easy to grasp: Snell throws fastballs high and everything else low, a concise modern strikeout pitcher. For seven-pitch junkballers, the spray is a bit more cacophonic, but theoretically it’s teaching you some of the same things. From Randy Vásquez’ graphic,

you might deduce that he buries the changeup low as a chase pitch; that the sinker is a front-hip comebacker; that the cutter, sitting in the middle of the zone, is more for missing barrels than getting chase-and-miss; etc.

Complexity Level 3: The shape of each pitch, how much it moves on the way to the plate. At the start of the graphic, seeing the pitches in partial profile, we can (theoretically) see sink vs. “rise.” Then, after the camera slides over to the umpire’s position, we can (theoretically) see left-to-right or right-to-left. Alas, from the close-up behind-home angle, these differences are extremely subtle. In real life, for instance Emerson Hancock’s cutter (the violet) and changeup (the green) move 20 inches in opposite directions, but on the graphic they look like buddies:

Complexity Level 4: The slightly different release points for each pitch; the spin axis (as shown in the different spin directions of each ball); and, perhaps, the tunneling effects of pitches that start out looking the same but diverge midway, fooling batters. This is information that, even if we really want to care, most of us (including your neighborhood newsletter writer) don’t really have the expertise to interpret, at least in 10 seconds of 3D powered by Google Cloud.

So in summary: The text box shows what the pitcher throws; the zone box tries to show where he throws it; and all the moving parts show pitch physics, which are very fancy but a little bit ehhhhhhh as far as general usefulness.

Now, for most of my life, all that broadcasts gave us for pitcher scouting reports were a few topline stats and some bad attempts at tying repertoire to wordplay:

In the 2000s we started getting lefty-righty splits on the stats. In the 2010s, we got pitch breakdowns (45 percent fastball, 22 percent slider, etc.) Now we have precise three-dimensional representations of each pitch type, laid atop each other so we can see how they interplay with each other! It’s pretty miraculous! To get from this

to the Statcast 3D graphic is like going from horse and buggies to space ships in one lifetime. We are swimming in graphic abundance.

Pt. 2: Where It’s Losing Us
And yet, this incredible achievement mostly loses my dad and mostly fails to interest me.

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There are others who primarily want to win. Being good at baseball (fast, hard, far) is one way to accomplish it, but it’s not the only way. These are the players who look for edges, hustles, ambiguous rules, momentary openings—the various design bugs that haven’t been patched yet. It doesn’t matter whether the loophole showcases their exceptional speed or power. Speed and power, to these guys, are just tools, not ends.

These are the games players. Dig into the games player’s background and I suspect you’ll find a childhood filled with a lot of games—not just baseball but all sports, and not just sports but board games, card games, road trip games, four square and butts up, calling shotgun for the front seat, selling magazine subscriptions to win a clock-radio, anything that grafts strategic thinking with competitive drive to make one inseparable unit. There were also probably bigger neighbors, or siblings that would play them for money, or a parent that loved to play games and never went easy on them just because they were young. There was probably something that forced them to be creative rather than prideful.

““““““

Josh Naylor is the era’s preeminent games player1. On Saturday, he reached first base in the third inning. Randy Arozarena, the next batter, doubled on the first pitch. Naylor tried to score. The play at the plate was close. As the ball approached the catcher Dillon Dingler, so did something else: Naylor’s sliding oven mitt, flying the final 15 feet ahead of Naylor, bouncing off Dingler’s knee and right into the swipe of his tag.

Jason Benetti, on the Tigers’ broadcast: It’s not a bad idea to try to gum up the works if you’re allowed to do it.

Andy Dirks, on the Tigers’ broadcast: I don’t think you can throw equipment at other players! I would say that’s probably illegal somewhere in the handbook. I mean there’s no way it would be legal to throw something at an opposing player. But it was pretty sly.

The next time Naylor batted, the Tigers’ pitcher threw a first-pitch fastball at Naylor’s neck. Naylor laughed the whole way down to first base.

The connection between those two acts, throwing a sliding mitt and reaching base an hour later because of it2, would seem impossible to contrive. Elite games players play high-level games.

““““

The games player’s most powerful weapon is ambiguity, which makes his motivations impossible to pin down, which keeps him one jump ahead of the lawmen. As Andy Dirks noted in that Tigers broadcast, it has to be illegal to throw equipment at a fielder, and yet Naylor threw his equipment at a fielder and nothing was called against him. That’s the power of ambiguity.

Naylor after the game offered up his innocent explanation. “I couldn’t get [the mitt] on in time at first base3. And then I forgot about it as I was running the bases. Then I noticed I had it on the video4, and it just flew, and I felt really bad. I just totally blanked on it.”

The explanation seems less plausible the longer it goes. The throw itself—with follow-through of the throwing hand, across his body to hit the catcher square, timed just right to coincide with the ball—

looks perfectly suspicious.

But umpires are told to be reasonable, and reasonable people keep in mind that accidents look suspicious all the time, that there are often more innocent explanations than our paranoid instincts ever allow. Maybe Naylor really, truly, felt really bad that that all happened.

““““

Last summer, William Contreras popped out to the first baseman. As he jogged down the baseline, he carried his bat with him for about 50 feet, then hucked it away, in a very provocative way:

You can hear Dave Flemming voicing your exact reaction: “Whoa! That—I did not like that!” The first baseman Dom Smith, who didn’t react on the field, but who presumably saw the video of the bat-huck on his dugout iPad, had a serious discussion with Contreras the next time he came to the plate. MLB Network did a panel discussion of whether Contreras was “up to no good,” and the consensus was that he was obviously up to no good.

/Video rolls
All: [Cackling laughter]
Brian: That is egregious!
Jake: He’s absolutely up to no good. This is the edgiest Milwaukee Brewer, and I love that Dom Smith called him out on it. This crosses the line.
Brian: That actually is a dangerous situation, putting a bat toward a guy’s feet when he’s looking up in the air.
Jon: If you have to ask, they’re always up to no good. That’s human nature! The only problem he had there was his aim was off. He missed him.

Roughly 90 percent of replies to the Tweets, Instagram posts and Reddit threads about this play agreed that Contreras had done it intentionally, that it was bush, that it was evil, etc.

I’ve been walking around with this play for 10 months now, and—having also studied the batter behavior on about 400 other pop-ups hit to that part of the field—I’ve concluded that William Contreras was framed.

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There is a counterargument to this, and on May 23 Nico Hoerner argued it. Hoerner got a little chopper and successfully hiked it between his legs, no turn, no look, to first base for the out.

I’m not saying that highlight is on the level of The Catch, but you can hear from the broadcasters’ reaction how intensely satisfying it was in the moment, and it ended up as the headliner on MLB’s Top Plays roundup that day. While it looks an awful lot like improvisation, it’s actually the opposite. Hoerner’s been getting closer to this play for years.

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Given the situation—many baserunners, advanced count—he only needed to be 30 percent confident in a challenge to justify it, according to Oyster Analytics’ challenge-math tool. But Turang passed up the chance. Two pitches later he struck out.

Now two months later, Turang still hasn’t challenged a pitch. Joe Sheehan used to write a fun annual column at Baseball Prospectus called The DiSars, which commemorated the batter who went the deepest into each season without drawing a walk. Turang is the clear frontrunner to be the player who goes the deepest into this season (by pitches seen) without issuing an ABS challenge.

Of the 250 players who’ve seen the most pitches this year, all but nine have filed at least one challenge (and some have filed as many as 19). These are the nine non-challengers, along with how many called strikes they’ve accepted:

• Francisco Lindor: 65

• José Tena: 66

• Josh Lowe: 75

• Carlos Narváez: 78

• Shea Langeliers: 99

• Brandon Marsh: 105

• TJ Friedl: 117

• Yandy Díaz: 136

• Brice Turang: 177

Turang is a bit of an unexpected champion here. He is a hitter who treats the strike zone with extreme consideration. He’s got the sixth highest walk rate in the majors. He’s an MVP candidate right now, in part because he has doubled his walk rate, in large part because he has cut his chase rate from just league average to one of the league’s best. He both knows the strike zone and he cares deeply about it, and yet when it comes to free balls he’s on track to be the league’s most reluctant claimant.

Turang has so far taken eight pitches that he could have challenged1 successfully.

He wasn’t fooled by those eight pitches. After one strike call he shook his head in disagreement,

at another he snapped his head back toward the umpire,

he exhaled a disapproving “oooh” at another one,

and gave a smirky grimace at another.

So that’s at least half of his wrongly called strikes where he demonstratively understood he’d been wronged, but was unwilling to risk a challenge.

*
One variable that helps explain this is Turang’s team. Brewers hitters just don’t challenge much. They have the lowest challenge rate (on offense) in baseball. On defense, meanwhile, they have the second-highest challenge rate. This has all the appearances of a teamwide philosophy based on some easy-to-grasp math: Their hitters’ challenges have been successful only 32 percent of the time, while their catchers’ challenges have been successful 57 percent of the time, so giving the defense a near-monopoly on challenges is a much more efficient use of an expendable resource. (The Marlins have similar tendencies.)

But if the Brewers have suggested this logic to their hitters, they clearly haven’t mandated it. We know this because their DH Gary Sánchez has challenged 16 times. He has nearly half the team’s challenges! Gary Sánchez, batting on a team that clearly seems not to believe in batters challenging, has a challenge rate 500 percent higher than the league average. He’s the second-most challenging hitter in baseball.

More hitters need to challenge like Gary Sánchez. More hitters need to challenge like Brice Turang. But it’s the hitters like Turang who should challenge like Sánchez, and it’s the hitters like Sánchez who should challenge like Turang. Broadening out, the league as a whole doesn’t seem to have gotten this.

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It’s somebody’s job to figure out what can be sold and how often it can be sold and how thirstily the league’s authenticators can switch out the bases for profit. But if nobody is currently doing that job, I will do it. I have thought deeply about how much value things have once they have stood next to famous athletes. To demonstrate my passion for the subject, I have ranked everything.

There’s only one rule here: We only get to state generally which game-used item is available. So for this exercise, a game-used ball could be the one that Shohei Ohtani threw to strike out Mike Trout, but it’s MUCH more likely to be a ball that Aaron Loup used for one pickoff attempt before it was tossed out of play, or some such.

Tier 1: Mostly Stuff That Would Be A Bother To Own, And If It Were Offered I Would Refuse Delivery.

$0 to $4.99.

Game-used infield tarp. Game-used infield dragger, game-used chalk-line marker, pine-tar applicator, socks, bullpen phone, or the game-used cushion that stretches down the length of some dugouts’ benches. Game-used filthy on-deck mat.

Game-used pants (umpire or player), game-used non-spiked footwear, game-used sweat towel, game-used water cup.

[Antiquated Tier 1: Game-used tin of chew.]

Tier 2: Mostly Stuff That Would Be Cool For Only About An Hour, But Would Be Interesting To Show At Least Two People In Your Life; Or, At Least, Is Worth At Least $5 In Practical Value

$5 to $19.99

Game-used bucket of gum, game-used Mota stick, hitter’s elbow guard, catcher’s protective gear, shattered bat, batting glove, base. Game-used bat-like objects in the on-deck circle.

Game-used umpire’s shirt (with MLB logo), game-used infield hose, ump cam, compression sleeve, base coach’s helmet (no flaps). Game-used thumb guard.

[Antiquated Tier 2: Game-used oversized chest protector that makes the umpire look like a rectangle.]

Tier 3: Mostly Pretty Cool Stuff That Would Give You A Thrill To Own For A Few Months, But Isn’t Especially Well Suited For Display, Holding, Or Playing With.

$20 to $69.99

Game-used Gatorade cooler, catcher’s mask, umpire clicker, cap, spikes, batting helmet, lineup card, weighted donut. Game-used waist satchel that the umpire uses to hold extra baseballs in reserve, game-used PitchCom, scouting card that a fielder takes out to the field as a cheat sheet.

Game-used sliding oven mitt, game-used wrist bands, umpire’s whisk brush for cleaning home plate, game-used bullpen stretchy bands or other unconventional warm-up equipment.

Game-used BAT BOY jersey.

Game-used catcher’s wrist guard with the transparent pocket for scouting reports. Game-used head band.

(Antiquated Tier 3: Game-used Phiten necklace.)

Tier 4: Mostly Stuff That Would Be Really Fun To Display, And Could Even Be Interesting Accent Pieces For Somebody Who Doesn’t Even Care About Baseball But Enjoys The Extraordinary Kitschy Weirdness Of Modern Stuff Production

$70 to $299.99

Game-used home run celebration prop.

Game-used cleat-cleaner on the back of the pitching mound. Game-used sunglasses, jersey, base coach’s stop watch, ball. Game-used pitching rubber, game-used home plate, game-used rosin bag, belt, game-used player’s personal water bottle.

Game-used manager’s scorecard, game-used protective cup, game-used bullpen duffle bag.

Game-used bat (whole). Game-used enormous nut used to secure the foul pole.

(Antiquated Tier 4: Game-used jacket brought out to a pitcher who has just reached base.)

Tier 5: Mostly Stuff That, While Obviously Priceable, Would Produce A Priceless Owner/Item Relationship, And That I Would Use, Wear Or Touch Almost Every Day.

$300 to $1,499.99

Game-used enormous pitch clock countdown display, game-used manager’s hoodie, game-used fully loaded iPad, game-used glove.

(Antiquated Tier 5: Game-used spotting scope used to steal signs from the bullpen.)

Disclaimer: The author of this piece is cheap and doesn’t really like owning things.

The Max Muncy Clips
Muncy takes two pitches for called strikes, on two different days, with two different umpires.

In neither case did he tap his helmet. The one on the left: No challenge. But the one on the right: Challenge, to Muncy’s great dismay. He had tried to walk away from the batter’s box, compliantly accepting his strikeout, but the umpire insisted he’d touched his head. The A’s lost the challenge and lost their challenge.

The Ben Rice clip
Rice didn’t touch his head.

The umpire mimes a head tap. Rice says something back, probably something like “no tap, bro,” and then the umpire mimes again, this time just generally waving toward his head. He appears to say “you tapped it.” Then, a moment later, he says “you can’t do that.” He either thinks Rice was lying, or he believes that waving one’s hand toward the head is equivalent to tapping it, and you can’t do that.

The Ildemaro Vargas Clip
Vargas starts to raise his arm but reconsiders at ear level, and camouflages the action by turning it into a cross-body stretch. Umpire calls this a challenge; Vargas’ dugout yells that he needs to touch his head for it to be a challenge; umpire accidentally turns on his stadium mic and booms out

“no he doesn’t.”

The Chris Bassitt Clip

Most pitchers don’t challenge, but when they do, it is almost always very demonstratively, with several loud and enthusiastic taps. This is because the pitcher, unlike the batter or catcher, has to get the umpire’s attention. Pitchers aren’t frequent challengers, and the umpire usually isn’t looking at them, and they’re far away. The pitcher must make himself seen to the audience in the back row.

The Bubba Chandler Clip(s)
The first (no challenge),

the second (challenge),

and the third (no challenge):

The Junior Caminero Clip(s)
First pitch of the at-bat, bases loaded, a pitch 3.5 inches below the strike zone—massively low—is called a strike:

Then, after an ensuing foul ball, Caminero is confused that the count is 0-2, not 1-1:

This strongly suggests that Caminero didn’t challenge the first pitch because the umpire’s strike call had been so tame—very, very tame—that Caminero thought the call was a ball.

The Austin Wells Clip
The catcher Wells tapped his helmet to challenge. As the umpire went out to announce it, Wells said something “no, nevermind,” and the umpire said something like “oh, nevermind.”

The Casey Mize Clip
After a pitch is called a ball, the pitcher Casey Mize signals that he wants to challenge it. The umpire looks at him and briefly shakes his head like no, too late. Then thinks, actually, it’s fine. He reconsiders and grants Mize the challenge.

The Oneil Cruz Clip
Not a challenge.

Full hand on the helmet, while making a face,

but no challenge. And I don’t think Cruz wanted there to be one. He didn’t plead for one, or even give the umpire a second look. I think he just wanted to do what batters do all the time: Give the umpire an annoyed look while steadying his too-loose helmet.

The Samuel Basallo Clip

The Jonah Heim Clip
The ball gets away from the catcher Heim. With a runner on base, he hustles over to pick it up, then turns back and without delay challenges the call. Umpire says time expired, no challenge granted.

Arguing ensued.

The Jeff McNeil Clip
Catcher taps his helmet, home ump doesn’t notice it, catcher says “phew, I didn’t want that anyway,” but the batter McNeil tattles on him. After some discussion, another umpire is consulted, who confirms seeing the catcher’s helmet tap. The challenge goes through.

***

ABS has been great, big win, everybody loves it, Rob Manfred’s second platinum single. It has also brought with it a fair amount of confusion, understandably for the first six weeks of a major new policy. The confusions fit into five categories:

• Partial Action Confusion (e.g. Muncy, Rice, Vargas)

• Intent Confusion (Chandler, Cruz)

• Seeing It Confusion (Bassitt, McNeil)

• Timing Confusion (Basallo, Mize, Heim)

• Call Confusion (Caminero)

All of these—even some call confusion, in a roundabout way1—basically boil down to two surprising things we’ve learned about the various ABS participants:

1. The people who challenge—they frequently, immediately, almost preemptively, regret their challenge, and want to take it back.

2. The umpires who enforce have a lot of room to read the players’ intentions either generously or not generously, and they are inconsistent in how they do it.

Some of the discussion of how to fix this confusion tends toward “how can we make the rules clearer,” by for instance replacing a brief and commonplace action (touching one’s hat or helmet after a pitch) with something harder to miss, like tapping the hat four times, or pulling a challenge flag from your pocket. There’s a case for a clearer challenge signal. But I don't think it would solve the problem.

That’s because, broadening out,

3. Some people will always try to get around laws, and an enterprising scofflaw is usually more nimble than the law itself can be.

4. Enforcers of a rule always have a lot of leeway about how to enforce it, and they bring their ideologies and interests and biases into that enforcement.

So you can write a clear law but you can’t make people follow it clearly and you can’t make people enforce it consistently.

There are parts of the ABS challenge system that are already clear, and they aren’t enforced consistently. As it has been conveyed to me by the league, a challenge is only requested by a player touching his helmet or hat; and not just that, but the top of his hat or helmet. Everything else, everything that isn’t actually touching the top of a hat or helmet, is insufficient, which is something the league has consistently made clear to teams. Yet umpires are binding players to “requests” that aren’t touching the hat or helmet. One just did it a couple days ago.

Similarly, it’s very clear that a player’s challenge window starts only after an ongoing play is concluded. The catcher doesn’t have to challenge before he tries to throw a runner out at second, for example, or before appealing a checked swing. This is very clear rule. No ambiguity. And yet Jonah Heim was denied his challenge because he’d been chasing down a wild pitch. The clarity of the rule didn’t solve the problem.

Here’s where I think the problem is, as the game is played right now:

• Players are very indecisive. They reconsider their actions mid-challenge (theoretically allowed) or post-challenge (probably not allowed).

• Umpires are very suspicious. They think players are trying to pull one over on them, trying either get out of their challenges or to extend their window for issuing them.

• Given the ability to be gracious and generous toward players’ intentions, they often instead treat them like crooks. The umps not only enforce the letter of the law more strictly than necessary, but more strictly than written.

• A challenge is then forced on players like it’s a prison sentence, a punitive tax on being part of a fallen species.

• It’s a deep trust issue between these guys.

I don’t know if Bubba Chandler meant to challenge in the second Bubba Chandler clip. He puts his hand there on the back of his hat after practically every pitch; that’s just his post-pitch hat-adjustment spot. But his body language looked aggrieved by the call, and he did give the back of his head a little pat. So it’s ambiguous. It’s reasonable to think he tried to challenge and then immediately wanted to take it back, as lots of these players do.

If you think he’s trying to get away with something, and your role in preserving a moral universe is to make sure nobody gets away with anything, it’s maybe a 50/50 call. But, when the ump looks out at him, and sees Chandler waving his hands no, no, no, no, the ump could just say “ah, he doesn’t want a challenge.” Whether he patted his head or not, he doesn’t want one, and we can move on. The ABS system is not primarily about trapping players in their momentary impulses.

Some umpires do grant grace. That umpire wasn’t sure whether Austin Wells asked for the challenge, and when Wells told him that he didn’t the umpire believed him. The umpire was arguably tricked! Wells clearly tapped! But what’s the harm? Wells just didn’t want the challenge after all.

The umpire thought Casey Mize had taken too much time to challenge. But then he thought, “or did he? Casey Mize isn’t trying to con me. He’s just a man who wants to honestly use this system that we put in place to make the game run better. And maybe my internal clock is wrong.” He gave him a little grace and the outcome was good.

So that’s my solution: Give them a little more trust than they actually deserve. If a challenge signal is ambiguous, the umpire should say “did you just challenge?” And if the player says “no,” then accept it and move on. Normalize the retraction, instead of treating every indecisive hitter or catcher as a criminal.

And if Jeff McNeil is there trying to be a rat, just tell him “chill out, Jeff, that’s not the game.”

***

You’ll hear people say a lot that ABS has actually made the umpires look really talented, and that’s true. Now that we see how microscopically close these pitches are—and how often umpires get them right anyway—and how hard it is for catchers and batters to be consistently more accurate than umpires—we can appreciate what incredible skill the home-plate umps have. Absolutely true.

But on an existential level, it’s not going as great for the umps. In the technical, measurable parts of the game, we can see clearly that the very best humans in the world are actually quite easily and seamlessly improved upon. So if umpires are going to have a long and robust presence in the sport, it starts to look like they have to do it by being good at humanity, good at doing things only humans can do better than computers. They need to manage the game well. They need to exercise wisdom and good judgment. They need players and managers and fans to want them out there. While ABS has been almost universally lauded, the umpires’ enforcement of ABS has been a bit spottier. This is their big test now.

Simple question: Which of these two pitches is better?

Listen, short of giving you matching center-field camera angles, I couldn’t have made this any easier: These pitches are both four-seam fastballs, thrown 93.5 mph, from right-handed pitchers to right-handed batters, in 3-2 counts. Height-wise, only 1/500th of an inch separates them. These pitches are identical in every way except for one, and that one is massive, enormous, obvious, it is in fact the very first thing a child is taught to distinguish good pitches from bad: The one on the left was out of the strike zone (unshaded circle on the strike zone graphic), and the one on the right was in the strike zone (shaded circle on the strike zone graphic). Sure, there’s only 1/100th of a horizontal inch between them, but that 1/100th of an inch is where the plate ends. The one on the left Just Missed. The one on the right is The Perfect Pitch.

Of course, you and I have watched a million ballgames and we know that, in fact, that 1/100th of an inch doesn’t change everything, because of batter error (batters often swing at balls) and umpire error (umpires often miscall strikes). From 2017 through 2025, there were about 3,000 pitches thrown in 3-2 counts1 that were a) clearly not high or low2 and b) no more than a quarter inch inside or outside the strike zone on the outer edge. Call this the quarter-inch zone: A quarter-inch in, a quarter-inch out, like the two pitches I showed you plus a sliver of cushion.

These 3,000 pitches split just about evenly between rulebook strikes and rulebook balls, but despite the categorical difference, they produced nearly identical results:

The Rulebook Strikes:

• 81 percent swing rate

• 68 percent called strike rate if taken

The Rulebook Balls:

• 80 percent swing rate

• 66 percent called strike rate if taken

If I’d let those two videos up top play longer, in fact, they would have ended on the same note: The umpires punched both batters out.

The Perfect Pitch has a tiny advantage on called strike rate, but that advantage is counterbalanced by the fact that pitches slightly further from the center of the zone are slightly harder to hit.

The Rulebook Strikes:

• 18 percent whiff rate on the swings

• .348 wOBA when put in play

The Rulebook Balls:

• 19 percent whiff rate on the swings

• .335 wOBA when put in play

Counterbalanced, in fact, almost perfectly. Over almost a decade, the run value of these two pitch locations in 3-2 counts was more or less identical. Whether the 3-2 pitch just clipped or just missed the strike zone, the run value was about 13 runs per 100 pitches3 in the pitchers’ favor.

So, for the purposes of those pitchers and batters, the line marking the strike zone wasn’t real. It was a shared fiction. The pitch that Just Missed was actually just as perfect as The Perfect Pitch.

2.

But in fact, neither The Perfect Pitch nor the one that Just Missed was ever even the best pitch. The Perfect Pitch, despite seeming perfect, was too hard for the umpires to consistently get right.

It was actually better to throw a 3-2 pitch that was more firmly in the strike zone, because then the umpire were less likely to blow it.

That graph shows the run value of 3-2 pitches based on how close to the outside boundary of the strike zone they were:

Pitches that were three inches within the strike zone were worth about nine runs per 100 pitches; pitches that were one inch away from strike zone were also worth about nine runs per 100 pitches4. The value curve between those two points peaks around 1 to 2 inches within the strike zone, not on the very edge itself.5

It’s intuitive what’s happening here. Umpires are less likely to blow a call if the pitch is comfortably inside the zone. But as the pitch gets closer to the center of the plate, the hitter is more likely to hit it well.

Every location is a trade off, hinging on the umpire’s fallibility:

Thousands of 3-2 pitch results suggest that the spot where those factors interact most favorably for the pitcher is a full inch or two within the strike zone, where the pitcher gives the hitter some hittability but smooths away some of the umpire problem.

So, unexpectedly, the Perfect Pitch was never better than Just Missed, nor was it even as good as Comfortably In. Something like this was probably the best pitch all along:

3a.

But the most important information about those pitches at the start of this piece is that they are from 2023 and 2024, before automated balls & strikes. Now, with ABS, the strike zone boundary is no longer a shared fiction, at least after a challenge is made. Because of that, the best pitch has changed, maybe profoundly.

We’re early, early, so take all of this with that caveat. So far in 3-2 counts there have been 68 pitches thrown in the quarter-inch zone: 35 were rulebook strikes, 33 were rulebook balls.

Batter swing rates still aren’t much affected by which side of the line the quarter-inch pitch falls on. But umpire error rate now is:

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1. Ivan Herrera sneezed:

Sneezes can be violent, but you don’t need to live in fear of them. Usually, you can anticipate them, brace the body, open the airways to release the pressure, and continue to live a healthy life even after sneezing occurs. Think of a sneeze as a lurching subway car. So long as you take caution—standing in a wide base, core engaged, ideally holding onto something secure—you will be fine.

But some sneezes sneak up, and the unprimed, unbraced body gets thrown into a much less predictable spasm. A 1,000-pascal burst slams into the upper airway, looking for any narrow pathway to force itself through.

This can be uncomfortable, but it is still (mostly) safe.

However, the existence of these sudden-onset sneezes points to the possibility of a much greater danger: That you will be confronted with such a sneeze in a moment when an unpredictable spasm could be devastating to your aims. When you are driving, or balanced near a high ledge, or walking down steps in skittery metal spikes, or you’re catching and the pitcher is about to throw, or you’re batting and the pitcher is about to throw, or you’re umpiring and the pitcher is about to throw, or you’re third-basing and the pitcher is about to throw, or you’re pitching and the pitcher is about to throw.

This will seem to be a greater threat not because something truly catastrophic is highly likely—most sneezes will happen between pitches, when you’re merely receiving a new ball from an umpire—but because you can’t imagine ever being truly safe from the threat. As with an airborne toxin, this danger has a way of spreading out and filling every inch of possibility, so that you live in persistent, simmering fear of sneezing at the wrong time.

What can you do? Only accept, in advance, that the terrible thing might happen, and truly ask yourself what it will say about you if it does. Because the answer is: It won’t say anything important. It will say you have a fragile body in a dangerous world, same as always, same as every other living thing. It will say your life will not be an uninterrupted run of success, but nobody’s is. In the most disastrous case it might say you are mortal, but in the long run you will be much happier to have kept that fact in mind.

2. Cal Raleigh Didn’t Make The Catch
I love this pop-up, which the catcher Cal Raleigh lost off the bat:

It’s easy for that to happen to a catcher; his head is tilted down to receive the pitch, his range of vision obscured by his mask, and more than likely his eyes closed on the swing. So Cal Raleigh being lost isn’t why I love this. I love it because of how many people didn’t follow the ball but, instead, followed the lost catcher off the trail.

The batter did:

The on-deck hitter did, and the bat-boy in the A’s dugout did:

The home-plate umpire did:

The pitcher did:

There’s a drawn-out metaphor about the plights of modern life but let’s just move on.

UPDATE/CORRECTION! I hope you enjoyed that fantastical tale. It turns out the ball hit the roof, explaining everything. There’s a very literal, non-metaphorical lesson here about the plights of watching two games at the same time, one of them on mute.

Also, that’s Mitch Garver, not Cal Raleigh. Apologies for the errors and for wasting your time, and thanks to Mark for quickly alerting me.

3. Drew Gilbert Was Held.

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• Leadoff hitter dribbles the ball up the third base line; Rogers himself must attempt a tough play, but he has no chance, and it’s a single.

• Next hitter chops the ball in front of home plate. Like three feet in front of home plate. Catcher glitches and lets it land, presumably to see (for some reason?) if it will roll foul. It doesn’t, now it’s too late to do anything, it’s ruled an error.

• Next hitter singles on a five-hop grounder just past a shifted second baseman. It’s hit 83 mph and drives in the tying run.

• Next batter chop a ball that bounds just over Rogers’ reach into the no-man’s land behind the mound. The out at first is recorded—thanks to the infield playing in—but the runners advance, pushing home the go-ahead run.

• Next batter taps a swinging bunt toward the third baseman. The out at first is recorded but the runners advance.

• Next batter grounds out weakly to second base to end the inning.

Here’s the entire inning’s carnage, in 25 seconds:

Two runs scored, Rogers took the loss, and his ERA jumped up to 0.93.

It can be distressing how much baseball is fueled by the tears of pitchers who made their pitches, got precisely the swings they hoped for, yet somehow were still charged with a hit. The two most newsworthy highlights from Monday’s games both hinged on really gross hits:

Mason Miller’s 34 2/3 inning scoreless streak was snapped. The guy who scored the streak-snapping run reached base by way of this pathetic tapper, which on top of everything else was incorrectly ruled fair:

The Pirates, in a bullpen game, took a perfect game into the seventh, before Alec Burleson swung at a 1-1 sweeper that was eight inches outside. He hit it 56 mph, the slowest ball the Cardinals hit all day (and the 14th slowest ball hit by any hitter in any game Monday), and he got a hit:

This stuff is going on all the time. Parker Messick, the Guardians’ budding star, allowed only three hits Monday, and two were undeniably ridiculous. The Red Sox won their third straight game thanks in part to Dylan Cease somersaulting awkwardly after a ball that the slugging young sluggerstar Roman Anthony had hit almost as awkwardly. And the Cardinals ended up beating the Pirates with a ninth-inning rally that was built around an Alec Burleson line-hugger hit 58 mph.

As a pitcher, [whiny toddler voice], that’s not fair. You did everything society told you to do. You were betrayed not because you didn’t play their game perfectly, but because you did. You get stuck with these hits that aren’t your fault!

Unless they are your fault. Are they your fault?

{:}

There was always a theory in San Francisco that Tyler Rogers was more prone to these types of hits than other pitchers. The common term was “bullshit hits.” Grant Brisbee spelled it out for me:

Bullshit in, bullshit out. You’re going to throw a pitch I’ve never seen before? Well, here’s a batted ball your third baseman has never seen before. It has an exit velocity of -6 and it just hit him in the nuts last Thursday for an infield single. Next batter breaks his bat for a single, two on, nobody out. Classic Tyler Rogers rally.

We’re not talking about the normal, probabilistic compromises of all batted balls, where some routine grounders skip through the hole and some smoked liners find leather. We’re talking the most inexcusable hits, the ones where a batter is visibly overmatched—maybe because of location, maybe because of the pitcher’s great stuff, or maybe (as in the case of Rogers) because of the pitcher’s general hinkyness—but ends up getting a hit anyway, probably breaking his bat, possibly requiring an IL stint. Swinging bunts, jam shots, wind-pushed parachutes, pop ups first basemen spun dizzy, sledge-hammer swings producing whispery contact, accidental swings that end up spraying chalk.

I don’t want this post to be too loaded with profanity, so instead of repeatedly using that common term I’m going to just refer to these as hits where the Batter is Overmatched by Location, Stuff or Hinkyness, abbreviated as BOLSH hits.

Here are the four types of BOLSH hits I’m querying for:

• Steep choppers—launch angle lower than -30 degrees, exit velo less than 95 mph. The ground takes all the sting out of the ball, no matter how hard it comes off the bat. The very best it can look is like this, though most look much, much worse. The league hits .190 on these.

• Weak grounders—launch angle -5 to -30, exit velo less than 80. The very best it can look is like this. The league hits .070 on these.

• High, weakish pop ups—higher than 45 degree launch angle, less than 85 mph. The very best if can look is like this. The league hits .050 on these.

• Very weak everywhere else—launch angle -5 to 45, but exit velocity under 70, so the contact is way off the sweet spot. The very best it can look is like this. This is the so-called Donut Hole, where garbage contact ends up falling in front of outfielders; the league hits .345 on these, without really trying to do it.

About 20 percent of all balls in play fall into one of these categories. The league hits about .130 on them, which means that about 3 percent of all balls put into play turn into BOLSH hits. Precisely, 2.93 percent. That’s our baseline.

Taylor Rogers, Tyler’s left-handed twin, allows BOLSH hits on 2.4 percent of balls in play. Trevor Rogers, who has nothing to do with Tyler Rogers, allows BOLSH hits on 2.6 percent of balls in play. Tyler Rogers allows BOLSH hits on 4.1 percent of balls in play, which gives him a BOLSHhit+ of 138, or 38 percent higher than league average.

That puts Tyler well above league average, though not quite extreme. These are the true victims of BOLSH hitting (minimum 2,000 pitches thrown since 2024):

• 5. Tyler Kinley, 166 BOLSHhit+

• 4. Aaron Bummer, 181

• 3. Mark Leiter, Jr., 194

• 2. Jhoan Duran, 205

• 1. Huascar Brazobán, 213

Brazobán isn’t an obvious weirdo the way Tyler Rogers is. He actually looks like a pitcher, not a guy trying to dance through a laser field in a heist movie. But he is a bit of an outlier. He gets elite arm-side run on his sinker, which helps keep balls off the barrel; and the difference between his changeup and fastball velocities is pretty small, which is a trait that tends to produce bad contact more than whiffs. When he’s not giving up BOLSH hits, he gets a lot of BOLSH outs: His average exit velocity in the past three years is the league’s lowest1. His placement here, then, make sense.2

But our first leaderboard isn’t filled with Brazobán types. Duran, Leiter and Bummer, for instance, all throw sinkers, but their sinkers get less than average run. And Kinley doesn’t throw a sinker at all. (Kinley might not throw any pitches, to be honest; have you ever seen Tyler Kinley?) Some of those five pitchers are good and some aren’t; some throw hard and some don’t; some have funky mechanics and some don’t; some suppress hard contact in general and some don’t. They’re a variety pack.

They’re also all relievers, barely reaching the minimums threshold that I set, so maybe they’re all noise. Let’s try filtering the relievers out and setting a higher minimum, of 4,500 pitches thrown since 2024. Now we have:

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The Padres run one of the filthiest dugouts in the league. Each game starts with a pristine dugout floor that gradually clots with trash. The trash served a purpose. The Padres are well hydrated. Their joints are lubricated.

Humans have a hard time staying hydrated. That’s why we get so many reminders to drink eight cups a day, why there are so many life hacks meant to build in hydration nudges, why so many people keep investing in larger bottles. It’s hard to remind yourself to drink; harder still to remind the 26 young men you work with.

The median MLB strategy is to fill two big Gatorade coolers with water, making it both accessible and—thanks to the Gatorade logo’s bright orange color scheme—visually loud. A more advanced approach is to pre-load a bunch of cups and stack them on the top of the cooler, so players can grab without pause. Better still, water is in one cooler and something like Gatorade in the other, because people are more likely to do the right thing if they think they have a choice.

The Padres go even further. An assistant trainer walks over, two cups in hand, and all but pours hydration into them:

The Padres have smoothed out any possible source of friction in the act of hydrating. You can lead a horse to water, but it’s even better if you can lead the water to the horse.

[+]

The same night, about 100 feet away, the Mariners were also playing, and things went the opposite way for them. They jumped ahead early and blew the game late. Started the day good at baseball, ended it bad at baseball.

Get a look at how clean their dugout was:

Halfway through the game and there is no evidence the Mariners had consumed any water at all. There is no assistant trainer bringing them water, no pre-loaded cups atop a Gatorade cooler, no Gatorade cooler, and no healthy trash on the floor.

The Mariners dugout does have hydration options, but they are below-average options. The Mariners get fresh bottles of water. On paper, this is adequate. But it’s much worse than cups on jugs.

The most obvious flaw is that it takes effort to open a new water bottle, sometimes extraordinary effort,

especially if your palms are sweaty or have recently applied sunscreen.

Once the bottle is open, it’s the wrong size for the job. It’s too much water for the moment. The player only wants a little sip, but the water keeps going all the way to the bottom:

To open a new bottle initiates a mental burden for the player. He can either waste—and plastic bottles are, if not the most common example of personal environmental guilt-inducing responsibility, very close to it—or he can set the bottle aside to finish it later. The latter is a ludicrously optimistic plan. We’ve all been to picnics. We all know the experience of thinking we are going to remember which of the many alike plastic water vessels is ours, and then immediately losing track of it and having to start over with a new bottle. Instead of ever going back to finish our bottle, we are really just contributing to the growing swarm of partially finished drinks, aligned identically like three-card monte.

If our personal commitment to the environment is great enough, we really do return to the bottle swarm and hope & pray that we will choose the right one, based on how much water we think was left in ours. Guess wrong, though, and the reward is mono.

A paper cup can be tossed on the ground, immediately forgotten about, ready to return to the earth. A plastic bottle can’t be tossed on a dugout floor. Somebody could easily slip on a plastic bottle, roll an ankle or hyperextend a knee, and be out for six weeks. So a ballplayer who chooses to drink from a water bottle is committing to the future task of responsibly disposing of that water bottle. Combined with the other burdens, it’s much easier to just… not. Being thirsty isn’t that bad.

[++]

So the Padres, hydrated, come from behind, and the Mariners, less convincingly hydrated, blew a lead, and the respective dugout floors in each team’s ninth inning show all the evidence we need to see the difference between their nights.

We might wonder why the Mariners would choose to dry themselves out. But they didn’t choose it. The Padres chose it for them. The Mariners drank the water the Padres provided.

We know the Mariners didn’t choose their water set-up because, in the Mariners’ next series, which was at home, when they were in control of the water supply, they had much more optimized hydration stations:

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A few minutes later he was on first base, having been awarded catcher’s interference. On that pitch. The catcher interfered on that pitch. The event that we’d been building up to, that we weren’t even sure was rule-book possible, had occurred: Catcher’s interference had been called on a pure non-swing, and had been called at foot level.

We talked about this possibility in December, when we went over the Cubs’ attempts to get this form of interference called on the Yankees’ Austin Wells. Wells had clearly put his foot against Justin Turner’s but the Cubs couldn’t get the call, possibly because Wells had removed his foot quickly enough or possibly because the world wasn’t ready to have this discussion. (I described it as the Cubs shifting “into podcaster mindset.”) But they moved the overton window. And now we have official, umpire-sanctioned precedent: One needn’t swing at all, not even a tick, for that swing to be interfered with.

The White Sox were alert to this event, were waiting for this event.

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I frequently rely on that old line—by the economist George Stigler—about how a person who never misses a flight is getting to the airport too early. Being right all the time probably means you’re acting too conservatively, and there are opportunity costs that you’re not properly valuing. This has lots of baseball applications:

• A pitcher whose slider allows a .050 batting average is probably not throwing his slider enough.

• A league with an 80 percent success rate on stolen base attempts is probably not attempting enough.

• The team with the highest ABS Challenge success rate is probably not challenging enough.

And perhaps the simplest, clearest application of this: The Conservative Third Base Coach problem. This was one of Russell Carleton’s long-running crusades, going back to at least 2010. The typical “break-even” point for runners considering tagging up on a fly out is ~75 percent: If they are successful at least 75 percent of the time, they will add more runs (with their scores) than they deduct (with their outs).

The league is not 25 percent unsuccessful, or anything close to it. They’re more like 7 percent unsuccessful1, scoring on almost 19 of their 20 attempts while leaving scores of runners unscored. “The average team leaves about four runs on the table per year on potential sac flies alone,” Russell wrote in 2010.

So you read that, you internalized it, you ranted whenever a third base coach put his hands up, you subsequently noticed every inaccurate throw home that would have meant a run if the offense had just been more aggressive,

and you started to convince yourself that the goal might just be to get thrown out, to balance out the math.

And then this year Rhys Hoskins, with third-percentile sprint speed, tries to score on a fly ball that is at least 40 feet shallower than the typical Go range, and it looks so wrong that you realize it’s time for you to recalibrate.

Stigler Logic is presented almost as law: A too-high success rate is proof of bad process, and so a more moderate success rate must be proof of good process.

But does Stigler Logic actually apply to ball? Does break-even rate actually tell us how often the league should be doing all the things it has the option of doing?

({[1]})

Let’s define Stigler Logic as:

If Aggregate Performance Is Much Higher Than The Break-Even Rate, Attempts Are Under-Repped.

The first thing to realize is that the break-even rate is too low a goal, at least in the aggregate, because most events don’t happen in the aggregate.

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It’s Arráez’ concession that most stuck out to me. He was leading off the third inning, just trying to get on base with the Giants already down by five runs. He was ahead in the count 3-0, got a pitch that missed high by about an inch and a half, took it, and heard the familiar chimes of the 3-0 Autostrike.

(A reminder: that box you see in that broadcast clip is unofficial/wrong. For a short hitter like Arráez, it most likely overestimates how high his strike zone goes.)

In 3-0 counts, umpires have traditionally called anything remotely close a strike. You may have seen these niche-famous heat maps from FanGraphs 2012, showing the size of the called zone on 0-2 vs. 3-0 back then:

Batters historically just accepted this, relatively little argument and opprobrium after blown 3-0 calls. But they don’t need to accept it anymore. They can shame the umpires who call pitches like that strikes. They can force umpires to knock it off, or at least do their best to knock it off. Will they? Arráez failed the first test.

*

Here’s my ballpark estimate: Home plate umpires have blown about 4 million calls in the century-and-a-quarter of AL/NL ball. Most were missed for one of two reasons:

1. For a long time many umpires considered it their right to express themselves with their zones, and cultivated their own idiosyncratic boundaries, like James Joyce making up his own grammar. They chose to be wrong.

2. But even with a clear standard in mind, umpiring is very hard. Getting every call right is impossible. They couldn’t help but be wrong.

QuesTec and its umpire-evaluating descendants mostly put a stop to the former, and with every increase in scrutiny and precision umpiring has become more consistent. (Just in the Statcast era—2015 onward—missed calls had dropped by 35 percent before challenging started.) ABS is a cure for the latter, correcting many of the mistakes that occur at the limits of umpiring capability.

But under which of these does the 3-0 autostrike fall? Most assume it’s something closer to umpire choice. In 2010, John Walsh described this phenomenon as “the compassionate umpire,” suggesting (perhaps tongue in cheek) that umpires, like almost everybody else, pull for the underdog. But in 2016, at Baseball Prospectus, Guy Molyneux disputed that reading. He proposed that umpires’ tendencies in extreme counts show Bayesian thinking: They expect to see strikes in 3-0 counts, so on close pitches they lean on their expectations (or, in Bayesian speak, their priors) to avoid making mistakes. Put another way:

• Compassionate umpire: Expressing a preference (even if subconsciously)

• Bayesian umpire: Helpless against the difficulty of the task

There’s a lot about ABS that has been fascinating in the first week, and a lot that will be fascinating after we have a few months of data. But a question I’ve been most curious about this year is whether the 3-0 autostrike will survive. I don’t want it to. I hate it. Makes no sense, bails out pitchers who don’t deserve it, penalizes batters for not swinging when they should absolutely not be swinging. But something survives even nuclear war, and I fear the 3-0 autostrike might be the cockroach of missed calls. So let’s do the early check:

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1. Matt Olson’s Right To Challenge Is Rejected

Matt Olson wanted to challenge this pitch. But the umpire shook his head, “no, no, no,” deciding (presumably) that Olson hadn’t challenged it quickly enough.

Players are supposed to challenge immediately: “roughly two seconds after the pitch” is how it has been reported in several outlets, including MLB.com. That is a very rough standard indeed: Is it two seconds after the pitch, or is it two seconds after the umpire made the call? It must be the latter, but then is it two seconds after the umpire has voiced the strike, or deployed the physical “strike” move? Is it from the start of the mechanic or the conclusion of it? Even saying “strike” might take a quarter second, so it is timed from the S’s start or the K’s kicker? And does the player need to merely start his challenge within those two seconds—signaling his intent—or actually tap the helmet? The precision these questions presuppose is silly, because “roughly two seconds” is an amount of time designed to be approximate. It leaves this to be, inherently, a judgment call.

The judgment against Olson was extremely strict. From the time the pitch hit the catcher’s mitt to the time Olson’s hand hit his helmet was 2.16 seconds. It would be ridiculous to think the clock would start when the pitch lands, before the umpire has made the call—a batter couldn’t possibly be expected to preemptively challenge every single pitch he thinks is out of the zone—but even then, Olson completed his challenge in “roughly” two seconds.

From the umpire’s initial lean to the time Olson touched his helmet was 1.7 seconds. From the initiation of the umpire’s pointing mechanic to Olson’s head touch was 1.52 seconds. From the actual point of the umpire’s right hand to Olson’s tap was 1.23 seconds. And the time lapsed from the umpire’s point, to Olson beginning to raise his hand, was just 0.97 seconds. A reasonable assessment here is that Matt Olson spent 0.97 seconds deliberating. Less than one second! We’re not going to give him that? You gotta give him that.

This was a fairly low stakes situation—and Olson would have been wrong anyway, which he might have sensed in the microseconds after his tap—so this controversy came and went quickly. But the ambiguity here points to a looming Infuriating Moment In Baseball History. There is going to be a challenge in a big spot that is rejected because of this ambiguous standard, and we’re all going to go to war arguing about it.

(For that matter, we might also see the reverse: A player might make 90 percent of a challenge, only to pull away at the last second, as Max Muncy did here:

There was no challenge on that pitch. But will an umpire seeing a move like that rule that a challenge was issued, that intent was expressed? That a finger grazed? Yes. On a long enough timeline, yes.)

2. Eugenio Suárez Challenged Back-To-Back

Eugenio Suárez was punched out on a pitch inside, challenged it, and had the call overturned.

On the next pitch he was punched out on a pitch outside and challenged it, and had the call overturned.

I’ve probably watched 1,200 minutes of ball so far and this my favorite of them. I was giggling and cackling and hooting, despite having no interest at all in this game, so I can imagine what it was like in Cincinnati. (Suarez grounded out on the next pitch, sadly.)

There is one guy in the middle of all this amusement who is not amused: The home plate umpire, CB Bucknor. After the second pitch, he gives Suárez a look that is brand new for the ABS era. He’s not mad, exactly; it’s more like he’s looking at Suárez and wondering why other people have to exist at all:

This makes me wonder what the effect on umpiring will be. Umpires have always had bad days, just like anybody in any job. Sometimes they miss 15 calls. That happens, 15 missed calls in a day. And they hear complaints from the dugouts or the fans, but it probably doesn’t seem that unusual to them, because always hear complaints from the dugouts or the fans. They might have a sense that it’s not their best day, but the psychological damage of their missed calls is relatively contained. They probably think that they missed, at most, like four pitches. They’ll find out later it was 15, but by then they’re off the clock and it’s onto the next day.

ABS, though, means that on these bad days they’ll be caught sucking in real time. And there’s no ambiguity about it, no your word against mine. Each time you fail, it’s displayed on 24,000 square feet of scoreboard. And there is a decent chance that 800,000 square feet of humans will be celebrating and taunting you over it. Which raises the very, very, very real threat of umpires going on tilt in games, getting anxious, getting yippy, getting mad, feeling hurt.

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The professional poker player Sam Greenwood writes a newsletter called Punt Of The Day about his own mistakes, which is something I enjoy and admire. Sam is also a big ball fan. You can tell he’s my kind of ball fan by this question he sent me:

Do you know if anyone has written about what the peak win expectancy is for the average losing team in a given MLB game? … What I am aiming to find is that most sports fans are miserable because most of the time when their team loses they were a reasonably big favourite at some point during the game

Nobody has written about it that I know of, or that Ben Lindbergh knew of, and Ben is the living database of everything ever written. So I asked Dan Hirsch, a developer at Baseball Reference, if he could run the query and he did. Here are the results, in two parts:

• About 85 percent of losing teams were “winning” at some point, according to win expectancy.

This makes sense if you think about it, or even if you don’t. In standard win expectancy methodology every game starts at 50/501 and updates its state after each batter2. If the first batter of the game makes an out, the visiting team becomes a win expectancy underdog, which means that the only way for a visiting team to win without ever being “behind” is to

a) get the leadoff man on base, or else immediately drop to 48 percent win expectancy;
b) score in the top of the first, or else drop to 45 percent win expectancy; and
c) move the runner around the bases fast enough not to lose the win expectancy edge. Runners on first and third with two outs before scoring? You’ve technically become the underdog at that point, with 49 percent win expectancy.

For a home team to go wire to wire they must get the first two batters of the game out, since a runner on first with one out gives the visiting team a 50.16 percent win expectancy. And so on.

Is this what Sam was looking for? Probably not. Nobody blows a 50.16-49.84 lead and goes off to write The Myth Of Sisyphus. So where is the bummer line? I’m going to give you three situations, and you tell me which ones make you the most miserable.

Situation 1. Your team is on the road. It’s a cold April day and the opposing starter has a hard time getting loose. The first two batters single; the third batter works a walk. The bases are loaded in the first inning with nobody out, and you’ve got your cleanup hitter coming up!

You go on to lose.

Situation 2. Your team is on the road. Both teams score a couple runs early, but then a stubborn tie takes hold. It stays 2-2 until the seventh inning, when a two-out triple and a wild pitch give you a run! You hand a 3-2 lead to your high-leverage relievers with nine outs to go!

You go on to lose.

Situation 3. Your team is at home. The game is tied going to the bottom of the ninth. With two outs, you mount a rally: Single, single, walk. The bases are loaded and the pitcher looks gassed!

You go on to lose.

These are very different situations. I expect one’s emotional response to them would be:

Situation 1: You’d be really optimistic at the high point but not excessively sulky if you eventually lose.
Situation 2: You’d be pretty optimistic at the high point and very sulky if you eventually lose.
Situation 3: You’d be only cautiously optimistic at the high point, but devastated by the loss.

The twist is that these three situations all carry the same win expectancy: 66 percent for the batting team. The other twist (kind of) is that

• the average losing team in a major league game blows a 64.3 percent peak win expectancy

which makes these three situations almost average. This is more or less the typical amount of heartbreak for each day’s 15 losing teams.

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