Webb 2.0
Maybe the two most similar pitches thrown consecutively all year, and the ruckus that followed.
Day 73 Of The 2025 MLB Season
On June 71, the Braves manager Brian Snitker got ejected for arguing balls and strikes. The home plate umpire Gabe Morales called 145 pitches that day and, according to the Umpire Scorecard project, he missed only two of them2, which put him in the 99th percentile of home plate performances this year. Why the snit, Snit?
We can trace it most directly to a two-pitch sequence in the fourth inning, when Giants pitcher Logan Webb (and his catcher Patrick Bailey (and the umpire Morales)) put everybody in a scrambler. The first pitch, on a 1-2 count, was called a ball, and the next was called a strike, and now you get to play along: Which one’s the strike?
There are similar pitches and there are those. Vertically, they cross the strike zone at the exact same spot, 2.73 feet off the ground, precise to at least one-tenth of an inch. Horizontally, they deviated by only .4 inches, which is the width of your ring finger… nail. Take a moment to glance down at your ring fingernail; now imagine adjusting a target 60 feet away by just that margin. Logan Webb is so freaking cool.
The second GIF was the strike, though neither was in the zone. That was one of the two pitches Morales missed on the day. Ozuna hung around arguing for a long time, well into the inning break.
Webb had struck out the side, conspicuously,
and a half-inning later Snitker got tossed.
*
What differed between the two pitches to make Morales change his mind? Let me give you four possibilities:
1. Marcell Ozuna made the second one look better.
On 1-2, Ozuna took the pitch without a flinch, a confident and balanced take, and he got the call. On 2-2, Ozuna showed more tempt—his hands moved the bat forward a bit, his front hip opened up, and after the pitch passed his back foot came unplanted and he fell a step forward.
He doesn’t actually swing, but, in a Bayesian sense, on a coin-flip pitch, what’s an umpire to conclude? That Ozuna thought the second pitch was more hittable, that Ozuna thought it was more like a strike.
2. Umpires are fooled by sequential pitches trending toward the strike zone.
