Ballplayers Reject The Dropped Third Strike Rule

There are enough places to run in this world. They don't need this one.

Day 45 Of The 2025 MLB Season
On May 10, Christian Yelich took off stealing. But the pitcher Taj Bradley hadn’t yet taken off pitching, so he simply stepped off the mound and ran toward Yelich. There’s a script for the baserunner in this situation: Run hard to second and see if you can beat the throw; if you can’t beat the throw, try to slide with an acrobatic swim move; and if that’s not plausible, at the very least get in a rundown and hope the defense executes it poorly. Yelich did none of that. He expended as little energy as possible and walked into the out

In 2018, there was some controversy over Manny Machado jogging to first base on grounders instead of busting it down the line. "Before I even step out of the box, I look to the shortstop, he has the ball in his hands and I'm like, 'I'm out.' … I mean, what am I going to do?"

His explanation (and his dismissive phrase “Johnny Hustle”) created more controversy, and he’s walked it back a couple times, saying in 2024 that “it was misinterpreted and people still take it out of context and take it overboard.” But Machado basically won the war. He put into words what a lot of players feel, and what a lot of their bosses probably feel, too: Staying healthy is more important than going all out against an all-but-certain outcome.

This year, I’ve observed more players than ever shutting it down mid-play, in a variety of situations, both offensive and defense. Yelich, above is one example. Yelich obviously has no problem running hard—he’s got 18 stolen base attempts this year—but he picks his moments, as you might expect from a veteran who had back surgery last year.

This can be infuriating to some people—and I’m not saying it’s wrong to be infuriated, either—but it’s not illogical. It’s just a different kind of weighing the incentives, where the math says “injuries and fatigue are disproportionately more important than 1-in-100 shots at an extra base.” As the Bandwagon¹ put it the other day:

Hannah: The Juan Soto newscycle from a few weeks ago drew attention to the potential pitfalls of failing to hustle. But now that ‘load management’ is a well-established practice, teams don’t necessarily want guys running out every ground ball.

Zach: I wish Manny Machado had not backed down from his 2018 comments. Because [he] has jogged the jog. Going back to the beginning of 2018, he has missed a grand total of 59 games. Being on the field is valuable! More valuable than pretty much any midseason infield single, if you ask me.

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This is a long way of getting to the real point of this post, which is:

Almost nobody in baseball runs out third strikes in the dirt anymore.

So far this week there have been 46 strikeouts on pitches that Statcast labeled “blocked”—i.e. they were in the dirt—and with first base unoccupied. In those 46 occasions, only eight batters bothered to run to first base, even though nearly every one could have forced the catcher to at least make a throw.

(Of the eight batters who made an attempt for first, four were catchers, which is awfully interesting to me. They’re the players who are least likely to actually be safe—because they’re slow—and who have the best claim to load management—because they spend half of every game squatting—but who must know, from experience, what a pain it is for the catcher to have to go through with the throw, and what a relief it provides the defense to concede the out without effort.)

Maybe you look at those clips and say, well, they were going to be out anyway. Sure! That’s the point. Running hard even when you’re probably going to be out is how we used to define hustle. But 38 of 46 major leaguers, 83 percent, felt perfectly comfortable not hustling there. They’d concluded that an out is enough bad news for one at-bat; an out plus tired is more than they could handle.²

This is no scandal. Take Willy Adames. Adames is a player who, far as I know, has an impeccable reputation. He’s a team leader, a smart player, a cheerleader in the dugout, he wins everywhere he goes, just got paid a ton of money to be exactly who he is, and under no circumstances—none, he’s literally never done it since at least 2022—will he run to first base after a dropped third strike:

So to get to the REAL point of this post: Let’s all write to our representatives and ask them to rid of the stupid dropped third strike rule. It’s already an absolutely illogical concept from the jump³, but on top of that we now have conclusive proof that players don’t even want it. They never use it. They don’t even value attempts. The dropped third strike is like a dropped penny; too worthless to even reach down to pick up. It’s become so rarely applied that it’s hard to figure out why it exists.

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So far this year there have been almost 23,000 strikeouts across the league. Only 29 have led to the batter reaching base, which puts the league on pace for 51 this year. It’s getting rarer every year as runners decide they’ve got more important concerns than a catcher having to throw them out. Here’s the raw number of batters reaching on strikeouts every year in the 30-team era. (2020 and 2025 totals are adjusted to represent a 162-game season.)

That decline you see in the past decade comes despite, as you are well aware, a generation-spanning increase in overall strikeouts. If we look at runners reaching as a percentage of all strikeouts, the decline is even starker, and more consistent, going back to the early 1990s:

What’s it mean? It means baseball players don’t want this rule. It’s a bad rule! They’re not looking for more reasons to run unnecessarily. We don’t need to invent places to run; there are enough already.

So, in summary: Hustle, as a moral imperative, has become ambiguous; anecdotally, it looks like more and more players are opting out of max effort in min stakes; statistically, this becomes very clear when you look at batters’ response to third strikes in the dirt; and, emotionally, I wish with all my heart that this would cause the league to consider getting rid of the dumbest rule in the sport.

Day 46 Of The 2025 MLB Season