The offseason did its best to kill us. It really did. But here we are. Alive. Maybe even invincible. Baseball season has arrived, and we’re here to meet it. But what about your favorite team? Will they live forever? Will they die in a pit? After one day of games (I know, I know, the Dodgers and Cubs have played three), anything is possible. Anything at all. As such, in the thousands of words that follow, I’ve explained how and why each team could win it all, take home the World Series trophy, live forever, usurp the celestial throne and defeat God once and for all. I’ve also explained how and why each team could lose it all, never win another game, trip and fall down the M.C. Escher stairs for all of eternity, die screaming in a frozen void and slowly disintegrate into its elemental particles. Consider these the first and 99th-percentile projections.

Arizona Diamondbacks
Why They’ll Win It All: The power of the Double Corbin. In his first full season, Corbin Carroll dragged the Diamondbacks all the way to the World Series. Over his seven seasons, Corbin Burnes’ teams have missed the playoffs just once. And now they’ve joined forces. This is the first team in major league history to feature two Corbins. It will make them invincible. The only thing that could break the spell: trading for Patrick Corbin.

Why They’ll Lose It All: What if something should happen to Ketel Marte? I’m not saying anything will happen to Ketel Marte. I’m just saying that the Diamondbacks are going to worry about it. He’s so valuable to the team. What if he gets hurt? What if he gets tired? What if he gets bored of being amazing at baseball and decides to live the simple life, opening a cute little bed and breakfast out by the lake? The Diamondbacks will be so worried about Marte that they won’t be able to eat. They won’t be able to sleep. They won’t be able to play at all.

Atlanta Braves
Why They’ll Win It All: Atlanta is bounce-back city. Ronald Acuña Jr. got hurt. Spencer Strider got hurt. Matt Olson had a down year. Austin Riley had a down year. Michael Harris II had a down year. Sean Murphy had a down year. Ozzie Albies got hurt and had a down year. That’s a lot of stars with something to prove. This year, they’re back and they’re out for blood.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Exhaustion. Atlanta asks a lot of its players. The starters never get days off. The bench players never get in the game. This year, it will destroy them. The starters will get run down, exhausted, waste away. The bench players will start wondering why they’re even there. They’ll forget how baseball works, forget to show up to the stadium. The pitchers will run excellent FIPs, but when the other team puts the ball in play, it’ll just keep on rolling.

Baltimore Orioles
Why They’ll Win It All: Their adorable apple cheeks. All those young, identical Orioles with rosy red cheeks and wavy hair give the team a tactical advantage. When an opponent comes to the plate, they won’t be able to tell one player from another. Everywhere they look, there’s another bright-eyed, bushy-tailed baby bird ready to swoop in and steal a base hit. They’re one. They’re the same. They’re everywhere. Nowhere is safe. Why even try to hit the ball at all?

Why They’ll Lose It All: Rotation looks a little thin.

Boston Red Sox
Why They’ll Win It All: The Big Three. Roman Anthony, Kristian Campbell, and Marcelo Mayer will lift the Red Sox to heights hitherto undreamt of in Boston — not because Bostonians lack the capacity to dream of greatness, but because greatness of this magnitude, this splendor, is too powerful even to contemplate. In Boston, whenever someone starts talking about this kind of power, people start throwing tea in the harbor.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Garrett Crochet’s elbow. Walker Buehler’s elbow. Lucas Giolito’s elbow. Patrick Sandoval’s elbow. Liam Hendriks’ elbow. Alex Bregman’s elbow. Brayan Bello’s shoulder. Trevor Story’s shoulder. Rafael Devers’ shoulder. Rafael Devers’ other shoulder. Masataka Yoshida’s shoulder. Masataka Yohida’s back.

Chicago Cubs
Why They’ll Win It All: They’re gonna find intelligent life up there on the moon. And “The Canterbury Tales” will shoot up to the top of the bestseller list and stay there for 27 weeks. And I will love you again. I will love you like I used to.

Why They’ll Lose It All: I will never love you like I used to.

Chicago White Sox
Why They’ll Win It All: So here’s the thing. What you have to keep in mind is that… You know, people throw the word impossible around a lot but… Where there’s a will, um, you know, anything can happen? Right? I’ll get back to you.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Sometimes you just get unlucky.

Cincinnati Reds
Why They’ll Win It All: Elly will do it. Elly De La Cruz will lift us to victory on his impossibly large shoulders. He will carry us at the plate, in the field, on the basepaths. Elly will even glide to the mound with those unfathomably long strides when the game is on the line and fire a fastball clear through the catcher’s mitt. “Stee-rike three!” the umpire will shout. Elly will do it.

Why They’ll Lose It All: TJ Friedl will bunt too much. He’ll come to the plate 650 times and bunt 653 times. (He’ll borrow Spencer Steer’s bat and jersey and sneak in an extra three bunts as an imposter.) The grass in front the plate will be worn down into nothing. Friedl will reach base 23 times. He’ll have two RBI. Terry Francona will legally adopt him.

Cleveland Guardians
Why They’ll Win It All: The same weird reason they did so well last season, I guess.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Bo Naylor will be sad. He’ll miss his brother Josh Naylor, who used to be his teammate but is now just his brother who lives in a whole other state, in a whole other region, in a whole other time zone. Who is Bo Naylor if not the brother of Josh Naylor? Who will eat breakfast with him? Who will carpool with him? Who will chuck him playfully on the chin and say, “Uh-oh, looks like somebody forgot to tie their cleats nice and tight,” then lace them up the way mom always taught? The sadness will permeate the locker room. The players will spend all day thinking about their own siblings, far away in their own cities and states and countries. They won’t realize until it’s too late that brotherhood was all around them, waiting to be discovered.

Colorado Rockies
Why They’ll Win It All: The Rockies have finally figured out the way to take advantage of their unique environment: altitude training. They’ll be the fastest, best-conditioned team in baseball. They’ll never get tired. They’ll steal 20 bases a game. They’ll track down every last ball in the outfield. They’ll win the second game of every double header, 45-0.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Mountain men are strong and hardy. They live rough. They ride all night. They drink from streams and sing mountain songs. Unfortunately, they rarely play baseball, which leaves them unprepared for all the baseball to come.

Detroit Tigers
Why They’ll Win It All: They’ll play like tigers. They’ll slash. They’ll claw. They’ll pounce. They’ll also have Tarik Skubal.

Why They’ll Lose It All: They’ll play like tigers. They’ll be endangered due to deforestation and poaching. They’ll be alone and scared. They’ll wonder why they, of all teams, don’t wear pinstripes. Tarik Skubal will develop a blister.

Houston Astros
Why They’ll Win It All: Jose Altuve will turn out to be the greatest defensive left fielder in the history of baseball. He’ll vacuum up everything in sight. He’ll play so shallow that he can charge seeing-eye grounders and nail the runner at first. He’ll leap 20 feet to rob home runs that were destined for the Crawford Boxes, then land ever so softly on the warning track like nothing happened. Eventually Astros will realize they don’t even need a center fielder. They’ll move Altuve to left-center and play every game with five infielders. They’ll give up just 13 singles after the All-Star break.

Why They’ll Lose It All: With the University of Houston Cougars charging through the NCAA tournament, the team will get swept up in March Madness. They’ll paint their faces red. They’ll watch every game. They’ll get that Capital One credit card or bank account or whatever it is that Charles Barkley and Samuel L. Jackson are selling. They’ll roll baskets into the batting cages and the bullpen. They’ll shoot hoops all day long and forget to practice baseball entirely. It will turn out that Jose Altuve spent his whole life playing second base rather than left field for a reason.

Kansas City Royals
Why They’ll Win It All: Bobby Witt Jr. will wheel a blackboard into the clubhouse, don a tweed jacket, and patiently teach every player on the Royals how to play like Bobby Witt Jr. As his teammates sit in rapt attention, looking away only to jot down notes in the monogrammed notebooks he handed out beforehand, he’ll calmly explain how to run as fast as Bobby Witt Jr, how to hit the ball as hard as Bobby Witt Jr., how to plant your feet in the hole and launch a missile that knocks the first baseman’s glove clean off his hand like Bobby Witt Jr. The Royals will never lose again.

Why They’ll Lose It All: All the protestors shouting, “No kings!” will finally shake the resolution of the Royals. They’ll feel conflicted about representing the idea of monarchy at a time like this. They’ll call their representatives and demand better. They’ll march in the streets. They’ll be the change they wish to see in the world. They’ll never put on those jerseys again.

Los Angeles Angels
Why They’ll Win It All: Mike Trout. Mike Trout. Mike Trout will arise triumphant.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Mike Trout will have a knee thing.

Los Angeles Dodgers
Why They’ll Win It All: Ball don’t lie.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Actually, ball lies all the time. Ball is both disingenuous and capricious. Ball laughs in the face of expected stats and advanced ERA estimators. Mendacious ball cannot be trusted.

Miami Marlins
Why They’ll Win It All: They’re the strongest, fastest fish in the sea.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Old man.

Milwaukee Brewers
Why They’ll Win It All: Their job is to win the World Series.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Their job is to provide a summer of entertainment and passion and a way for families to come together.

Minnesota Twins
Why They’ll Win It All: The universe owes them this. For one glorious season, the baseball gods will smile on Minnesota once again. Byron Buxton and Royce Lewis will get healthy and play like gods. Matt Wallner and Trevor Larnach will slug 100 home runs. It will turn out that if you let Edouard Julien face left-handed pitching, he’s still a pretty good hitter.

Why They’ll Lose It All: The home run sausage has been sitting in a dark corner of the clubhouse for the last five months, waiting. It has grown limbs. It has grown sentient. It has grown strong. It has not grown a conscience.

New York Mets
Why They’ll Win It All: Juan Soto will rub off on Jose Siri. Simply by playing next to Soto, Siri will finally learn plate discipline. He will spit on breaking balls below the zone. He will lay off the high ones. He will see your splitter and raise you a shuffle. He will be the total package at the plate. His defense will also fall off a cliff, but it won’t matter much.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Jose Iglesias took all the vibes with him to San Diego. The Mets will be vibeless. Zero vibes. The locker room will descend into chaos. The players will turn on each other. They will hack one another to pieces. The streets of Flushing will run red with the blood of Brett Baty. Juan Soto will still put up 5.2 WAR.

New York Yankees
Why They’ll Win It All: Losing Juan Soto hurts. Losing Gerrit Cole and Luis Gil and Clarke Schmidt hurts. But this place has still got good bones. You’ve still got Aaron Judge. Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt could turn it around. Jasson Domínguez and Anthony Volpe could achieve their potential. This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

Why They’ll Lose It All: First the players grow beards. That’s good – let guys be themselves. But then the beards grow unkempt. They’re long and scraggly. They’re down to their chests. The road jerseys just read NE[beard]RK. They’re getting tucked into uniform pants. No one can even see their feet. Paul Goldschmidt goes to scoop a ball in the dirt, comes up with nothing but beard, and it takes him two days to untangle the webbing. Aaron Judge slips on one of those high-performance stroopwafels, hits his head, and gets retrograde amnesia.

Philadelphia Phillies
Why They’ll Win It All: Zack Wheeler will grow tired of depending on others and coming up just short. He will pitch on three days rest all season. He will throw 400 innings and strike out the world. During Game 5 of the NLCS, Rob Thomson will walk out to the mound with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 11th inning. When Thomson reaches for the ball, Wheeler will hook the manager’s arm and fireman carry him back into the dugout. He’ll then return to the mound and retire the side.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Sometimes the other team will hit the ball to right field.

Pittsburgh Pirates
Why They’ll Win It All: At 4:07 PM Eastern on April 4, the date of the Pirates’ home opener, an F-15 Eagle will perform a flyover at PNC Park. Paul Skenes will be in the cockpit. He will ditch, and as the fighter plane crashes screaming into the Allegheny, Skenes will float lightly down to the turf, stow his parachute, and strike out everyone in the building. His posture will make grown men weep. The Pirates will never lose again.

Why They’ll Lose It All: The Pirates will trade Paul Skenes while his trade value is at its highest. In return, they will receive several packs of flavorful, brightly-colored chewing gum.

[REDACTED] Athletics
Why They’ll Win It All: It will turn out that Oakland really was holding back the Athletics all these years. All those horrible people who loved the team and begged them to stay, who organized and boycotted and protested, who chanted and cheered and wept, who waited in line for a spoonful of dirt from the warning track after the final game at the Coliseum? It turns out they were the problem. Finally free from the burden of expectations, of familiarity, of love, the A’s will ruthlessly mow down the competition.

Why They’ll Lose It All: The Athletics will be unmoored. They will have no home, no sense of place, no identity at all. They’ll miss Oakland. They’ll constantly forget when it’s their turn to bat because they’re incapable of wrapping their heads around the idea that they could ever be the home team. They’ll never win a game in Sacramento.

San Diego Padres
Why They’ll Win It All: Luis Arraez will finally get curious about this “slugging” thing everyone keeps talking about. He’ll watch one YouTube video of Ken Griffey Jr. and decide to hit 65 home runs. But he won’t. He’ll hit 75.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Having a team full of shortstops will finally backfire for the Padres. Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill, and Jake Cronenworth will all finally get fed up with playing out of position. One day in April, they’ll all walk out to short and simply refuse to yield. Xander Bogaerts won’t know what to do. Mike Shildt will run out to short and beg the five shortstops to disperse. They won’t budge. The Padres will allow a BABIP of .750. Every time a ball is hit to short, they’ll race after it and fall all over each other in a heap. Cronenworth will launch a flying tackle at somebody. Merrill will bite somebody. Tatis will crumble like a sand castle.

San Francisco Giants
Why They’ll Win It All: Patrick Bailey will frame his way to victory. He will present every pitch so beautifully that the home plate umpires can’t even see it for the tears in their eyes. The Giants won’t walk a batter all year. They’ll only fall behind in the count six times. After they coast to the championship, Major League Baseball will be forced to intervene. They’ll implement a full robot strike zone before the 2026 season. Patrick Bailey will slip away into Redwood National Park, never to be seen again. But sometimes, when the park rangers are making the rounds alone late at night, they’ll swear they hear the sound of a ball hitting a catcher’s mitt. They never hear an umpire call the ghostly pitch a ball.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Buster Posey will inspire the Giants. They’ll take quality-at bats. They’ll hit the ball the other way. They’ll advance the runner and sacrifice and execute the hit-and-run. They’ll master the fundamentals. They’ll play the game the right way. They’ll score 36 runs all season.

Seattle Mariners
Why They’ll Win It All: Now that he knows he’s sticking around for a while, Cal Raleigh will take matters into his own hands. On April 10, the Mariners have the day off at home in Seattle, and Raleigh will roll up to T-Mobile park with two truckloads of construction buddies and a cooler full of cold ones. They’ll tear down the crooked batter’s eye and construct a perfect new one by dinner time. The Mariners will have the best offense in baseball.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Raleigh’s buddy Gary will get the proportions wrong when he’s mixing the concrete. In May, the batter’s eye will start tilting forward ever so slightly. By June, it will be listing wildly. The Mariners will put in a work order, but they won’t pay for an expedited repair. In July, the batter’s eye will finally collapse into center field in the middle of a game with a terrifying whomp, coming just inches short of driving Julio Rodríguez straight into the turf like a croquet peg. Rodríguez will refuse to play the outfield ever again. The Mariners will install a new, even more crooked batter’s eye and have the worst offense in baseball. Gary will never forgive himself. Raleigh will never forgive him either.

St. Louis Cardinals
Why They’ll Win It All: Nolan Arenado has been listening. He heard everything you said about him. His dwindling production. His shrinking range. His — outrage of outrages — merely average arm strength. He’ll prove you wrong if it’s the last thing he does. He’ll rebuild this team all by himself, one spiteful dinger, one vintage diving stop at a time.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Yeesh, I don’t know. Nolan Arenado’s not looking so hot anymore.

Tampa Bay Rays
Why They’ll Win It All: Everyone else in the division will get hurt. The Yankees’ two remaining starting pitchers will get frostbite from the cold tub. Boston’s outfielders will go in for a big group hug after a victory and they’ll squeeze so tight that they dislocate all their shoulders. Charlie Morton, Kyle Gibson, and Tomoyuki Sugano will all throw their backs out looking under the couch for the TV guide. The Blue Jays’ bruised psyches will never recover from their Opening Day beatdown. The Rays will waltz to a title.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Whither the dome? How can the Rays play outside, in sunlight, in moonlight? How would that even work? How do you catch a ball that hasn’t dodged six different catwalks? The Rays outfielders will never figure it out.

Texas Rangers
Why They’ll Win It All: Jacob deGrom will finally take something off his fastball for the sake of his health. It’ll sit a mere 97 mph. He’ll still strike everybody out, but he’ll never get tired. He’ll lead the league in starts, innings, wins, complete games, and shutouts. He’ll only pitch five games against NL teams, but he’ll dominate them so thoroughly that he’ll win both Cy Young Awards.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Jacob deGrom will finally take something off his fastball for the sake of his health. It’ll sit a mere 94 mph. He’ll get rocked. He’ll try pitching even slower. That won’t work either. To blow off some steam, he’ll attempt a hilarious prank on his fellow starting pitchers. It will go wrong. Three of them will be decapitated.

Toronto Blue Jays
Why They’ll Win It All: The wise, old pitching staff will prove they’ve still got it. Max Scherzer, Kevin Gausman, and Chris Bassitt will turn back the clock and finish one-two-three in the Cy Young voting. Young Bowden Francis will start wearing reading glasses and quoting Mad About You just to try to fit in with his elders.

Why They’ll Lose It All: The ongoing extension negotiations between Ross Atkins and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. will tear the team apart. Every morning for months, the front office will announce to reporters that they’ve made a new, more generous offer to Guerrero. Every afternoon, Guerrero will tell reporters that the offer was so pathetically insignificant that he can’t bear to speak of it. In early May, the beat writers will quit one by one as they run out of euphemisms for the words “negotiation,” “deferral,” and “chump change.” The players will be so wrapped up in the negotiations that they’ll forget that they’re even supposed to be playing baseball.

Washington Nationals
Why They’ll Win It All: James Wood and Dylan Crews will be everything they’re cracked up to be and more. James Wood will be Juan Soto, but bigger. Dylan Crews will be James Wood, but smaller. Keibert Ruiz will remember to swing hard. MacKenzie Gore will ride his slider to the promised land.

Why They’ll Lose It All: The Nationals will discover The National. They’ll grow obsessed. They’ll listen to nothing else. Their own internal monologues will take the form of Matt Berninger’s restrained, close-mic’ed but distant vocals. In the pop of the catcher’s mitt and the crack of the bat, they’ll hear nothing but Bryan Devendorf’s dry snare drum, hopscotching impossibly high in the mix. To the Nationals, every love song will be a tale of tragic, star-crossed love. There will be no way out. They’ll spend the season waiting for the crescendo to come, because it feels like the crescendo just has to be coming. It has to be coming. Any second now. Any second now the build will come and it will be glorious. It will never come.

I’m sorry to be the one to break this news to you, but the baseball season is starting in earnest tomorrow. While I’m sure you’re happy that you’ll once again get to watch the baseball men do the baseball thing, this also means that We Tried season is very sadly drawing to a close. This will be our fifth and final entry in the series, but as a refresher, We Tried is the term of art for an ex post facto report about a team’s interest in a player who signed elsewhere. If a beat writer reported that your favorite team had interest in a free agent, but only after that free agent became a Dodger, or if a scoops guy laundered the claim that your team took aim at a trade target and missed, I added it to the We Tried Tracker. With 49 of our Top 50 Free Agents off the board – seriously, somebody sign David Robertson already – it’s time to look back on the offseason that wasn’t. How wrong Yoda was; there’s no “do” or “do not.” There is only “try.”

As I searched for the final few additions to the tracker, I continued to refine the criteria for inclusion. For example, I decided at the last minute to honor A.J. Preller’s solemn assertion during the Winter Meetings that the Padres were “involved in, so far, almost all the catchers that have gone off the board to some degree.” I awarded them five extra We Trieds, all for catchers. That pushed them all the way up to second on our leaderboard, but they still finished dead last in our catcher positional power rankings. I also decided not to include the Roki Sasaki circus. The defining characteristic of a We Tried is that the information is publicized after the player signs, and although a few details did come out after he chose the Dodgers, nearly every part of Sasaki’s courtship involved up-to-the-minute updates. Likewise, the Orioles and Braves were both widely linked to Nathan Eovaldi early in the offseason, but once Eovaldi decided to return to the Rangers, no new information on their pursuits emerged. They didn’t capital-T try; they just – yawn – actually tried.

By my count, we bore witness to 99 We Trieds for 39 different players over the last few months. As always, I’m sure that I missed some, and I implore you to help me make it right. What a joy it would be to reach 100. If you spot an omission, please message me on Bluesky or email me at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com, which once again is a real email address that I really check. I reply to every message, and I even read everything in the spam folder. The tracker recently received an incredible offer for a “diamond facelit sign” with a three-year warrantee. I don’t know what a facelit sign is, and because the email is riddled with spelling errors, for a while I actually thought it was for a diamond facelift. I was so confused about what would happen were I to avail myself of the three-year warrantee. Would I get my money back? Would they lift my face even further? Would they replace it with a new one?

Read the rest of this entry »

Want to hear something crazy? Aaron Judge is switching back to right field after an 11.2-WAR campaign, but this year’s top right field projection is still nearly half a win below last year’s. There is obviously some logic behind this: Last year, Ronald Acuña Jr. was younger than Judge and was coming off his own monstrous 2023 campaign. He also plays for a team with a penchant for driving its starters until the wheels fall of, so we had him projected for nearly every single plate appearance. But still, with Judge in right field again, we should probably expect bigger things. The Yankees’ right field projection trails only one other position player spot, Kansas City’s (and Bobby Witt Jr.’s) shortstop projection, and it trails by just one-tenth of a win. Read the rest of this entry »

Early Wednesday morning, the regular season ended — for another week anyway. The Dodgers and Cubs played the second and final game of the Tokyo Series, casting us back into the pit of spring training baseball. Below, some notes on the game, a 6-3 Los Angeles win.

First Inning
It’s snowing in Tokyo. Roki Sasaki Day has finally come.

I woke up just after 4:00 a.m. ET and once again decided to just stay up. I have already written a thousand words about Max Scherzer. I’m not necessarily crisp.

On the first pitch of the game, Justin Steele starts Shohei Ohtani off with a fastball over the plate. Of course he does. He’s Justin Steele. Ohtani seems to be familiar with the scouting report – uh, fastballs – and he launches the ball to the opposite field. For a moment you think he’ll do it. The crowd thinks he’ll do it. Ohtani looks up at the ball hopefully, then grimaces. It lands just short of the warning track. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2025 Major League Baseball season began at 6:10 a.m. Eastern on Monday in the Tokyo Dome. After tuneups against NPB teams, the Cubs and Dodgers played a game that counted, though it still featured telltale signs of mid-March rust. Below, some notes on the game (and, more importantly, managerial eyewear).

First Inning
The first pitch of the game, Shota Imanaga to Shohei Ohtani, is a four-seam fastball for a called strike. The K-Zone graphic says it’s way too high. Statcast says it’s perfectly located at the top of the zone. Ohtani doesn’t challenge. This isn’t spring training anymore.

Both the Chicago and Los Angeles broadcasts have the crowd noise dialed way down, which is a shame. For all the talk of the electric atmosphere, the crowd registers as faint background noise, an oscillating fan in the other room.

Second Inning
In the top of the second, Imanaga walks the first two Dodgers and shakes his head in anger. In the dugout, Craig Counsell reaches for his spectacles.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto is having trouble locating too. In the bottom half, Dansby Swanson stays back and drives a curveball back up the middle. It’s the first hit of the season. Miguel Amaya doubles him home with a liner to right center. It’s the first run of the season. Yamamoto gets out of the inning by dotting a curve at the bottom of the zone to freeze Jon Berti. It doesn’t quite seem fair.

Third Inning
Imanaga leads Ohtani off with a high, hanging sweeper. It stays inside, and Ohtani tries and fails to let his elbow drift into it. “This has gotta be a splitter right here,” says Clayton Kershaw up in the booth when the count gets to 2-2. It’s another high sweeper, and Ohtani smashes it right at the second baseman for a lineout. Kershaw feels vindicated; he didn’t predict the pitch correctly, but the pitch he didn’t predict got crushed.

Ian Happ chops Yamamoto’s first pitch straight into the ground. A backpedaling Yamamoto reaches up and biffs it with the tip of his glove, slowing it down just enough that the second baseman can’t catch Happ.

Michael Busch’s bat looks like it’s as old as he is. The black finish is all nicked and scuffed, like he spent the offseason using it to knock the side of the TV when the reception got fuzzy. It’s the only thing on the screen that isn’t shiny and new. He grounds out on a splitter just like everyone else.

Fourth Inning
A giant screen behind home plate advertises a company called dip, all lowercase. If we’re lucky, we will never have to think about this company again.

Imanaga walks two more batters. Pitching coach Tommy Hottovy, a dark horse contender for the best name in baseball, walks out to say hello. Enrique Hernández lifts the first fly ball of the game, a deep out to center field.

Counsell picks up the phone. The Dodgers still don’t have a hit. Imanaga’s night is done.

Fifth Inning
The center field camera is lower than usual. It gives a nice view of the strike zone, and it has the added benefit of making the pitcher look larger than life. Ben Brown appears to be releasing the ball approximately eight inches from home plate.

The action picks up. Strikeout. Walk. Ohtani rips a single into right field. First and third, first hit of the game for the Dodgers. Ohtani and first base coach Chris Woodward lean in close, turn, and gently touch helmets.

Tommy Edman sends a dying liner into left. Happ lays out but can only trap it. First and second, tie ballgame. Teoscar Hernández hits a chopper to Matt Shaw at third. He throws to second to get the force, but Berti makes the turn and throws the ball away, allowing Ohtani to score from second. Will Smith chops one through the left side, and it’s a 3-1 game. Hottovy returns to the mound. Brown has a moustache as fine as cornsilk.

Max Muncy’s bat is painted industrial gray. He chases a big curveball in the dirt, then drops the bat in the dirt.

Yamamoto induces a couple hard groundballs. Miguel Rojas makes a nice play deep in the hole at short. Enrique Hernández makes a nice play deep in the hole at first, which isn’t something you get to say very often. Yamamoto punches Happ out with a fastball on the corner.

Sixth Inning
Yamamoto receives congratulations in the dugout. His night is done after five innings: one run, three hits, four strikeouts, one walk.

Ohtani comes up with two on and two out. You can finally hear the crowd for a moment. Brown strikes him out on three pitches. The crowd gasps.

With lefties due up for the Cubs, Anthony Banda replaces Yamamoto. There’s a little bit of Roy Hobbs in his delivery; it’s the way he swings his arms upward at the beginning. Three up, three down.

Seventh Inning
Brown is still out there, and when the Dodgers aren’t hitting him, he looks unhittable. But he’s profligate, requiring 65 pitches to get through 2 2/3 innings. He issues a two-out walk, and Counsell emerges from the dugout, glasses hooked on the collar of his jersey. Eli Morgan is everything Brown isn’t: short, dark-haired, economical. Muncy chops his first pitch to second base and the inning is over.

The crowd murmurs when Swanson lifts a Ben Casparius fastball into the right field corner, but Teoscar Hernández eventually drifts over to make the play. Pete Crow-Armstrong whiffs and sends his bat cartwheeling back toward the dugout.

Eighth Inning
With one out in the eighth, umpire Bill Miller stops the game because of a fan with a laser pointer in the left field stands. After play resumes, Michael Conforto drives a ball down the left field line for a double. For the third year in a row, the Dodgers are celebrating their doubles with the Freddie Freeman dance. Freeman was a last minute scratch with a rib injury. Attempting his own dance would probably leave him in agony right now.

“Day-O,” sings Harry Belafonte. Halfway through the crowd’s response, whoever’s in charge of the sound mix finally turns up the crowd noise for a moment. They dial down the fun again as soon as the call and response has finished.

Blake Treinen hits Berti on the forearm and the ball ricochets into Smith behind the plate for good measure. All of a sudden, the Cubs have the tying run at the plate. Berti steals second easily. Seiya Suzuki, 0-for-3 on the night, comes to the plate with two outs. He could be the hero. The crowd roars when Suzuki fouls a fastball into the stands on the first base side, but Treinen catches him way out in front on a sweeper, resulting in a weak liner to third.

“Thank you,” says Treinen to his God as he walks off the mound. Miller meets Treinen on the third base line and chats him up as he pats his pitching hand.

Ninth Inning
Ohtani hooks another base hit down the line, this one a line drive double off a Ryan Brasier slider. As is so often the case, Ohtani looks awkward, completely off balance, like he just reached out to poke the ball, but it comes off the bat at 107.8 mph. An Edman groundout and a Teoscar Hernández single bring Ohtani home, extending the lead to 4-1. Brasier gets into more trouble, gets out of it.

The Dodgers have chosen to forgo the gold trim with which World Series champions are allowed to accent their uniforms. The only gaudy touch is the MLB logo on the back of the jersey, which has had its white negative space gilded.

The other indicator of the Dodgers’ dominance, the addition that takes them from great to downright decadent, comes in from the bullpen. Tanner Scott sets the Cubs down in order, and just like that, Los Angeles is in first place once again.

Cincinnati Reds

A baseball cap begs to be broken in
It’s not just a matter of style
The human body features few straight lines
So nothing straight will sit flush
Nothing rigid will stay in place
Form-fitting requires hugging
Which is hard to do without bending
In one place or another

I think I learned late how to hug properly
How to smile in such a way
That people know you’re glad to see them
I still have to think about it sometimes
And I hate that
It should come naturally I think

I can never curve my brim just right
I’m always fiddling with it
Trying to make it fit me
Because I’ll never fit it Read the rest of this entry »

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: This was supposed to be the year for Francisco Alvarez. He had an electric rookie season for the Mets in 2023, putting up 3.0 WAR thanks to excellent framing numbers and a power-heavy approach that balanced 25 home runs with a .209 batting average for a 97 wRC+. Coming into the 2024 season, he was poised to go from breakout rookie to full-blown star, but he got off to a slow start and suffered a torn UCL in his left thumb in April. Alvarez returned in June and took a few days to get going, but put up a 112 wRC+ over his last 78 games and finished the season with 1.9 WAR. He’s now 23 years old, and once again, 2025 was supposed to be the year that he put it all together. Instead, Mets manager Carlos Mendoza told reporters on Sunday that Alvarez fractured the hamate bone in that same left hand during live batting practice on Saturday. He’ll have surgery today and be out for six to eight weeks, missing the first month or so of the season.

As the injury affects the meat of Alvarez’s catching hand, it would be reasonable to expect the absence to fall on the longer side of that range. However, Baseball Prospectus’ Recovery Dashboard lists two catchers who fractured their hamate bones early in the season – Francisco Cervelli in 2016 and James McCann in 2022, when he was playing for the Mets – and neither missed more than 44 days. Just to muddle our expectations even more, hamate injuries are thought sap a hitter’s power upon their return, but a 2022 study from Jason Collette reveals no such pattern. As power is the cornerstone of Alvarez’s game, losing it would pretty much crush his offensive profile, but it’s worth noting that, despite the thumb surgery, he actually put up higher max and 90th percentile exit velocities in 2024 than he did in 2023. The injury is obviously unwelcome news, and the last thing Alvarez needs is yet another surgery on his catching hand. Moreover, he’ll lose half of his spring training ramp up and have to jump into major league action after a rehab assignment. Still, this is not normally a major injury and there’s a decent chance that he won’t return in notably diminished form. Read the rest of this entry »

As you well know, this is the time of year when we talk about how projection systems are inherently conservative. Why isn’t Shohei Ohtani projected for a 12-win season? Because while that’s possible, it’s not the likeliest outcome once you’ve considered all the many factors that go into a baseball season. Projections aren’t meant to be thrilling. They’re meant to predict the future with the smallest margin for error possible. They’re regression machines. They crunch the numbers, they look to the past to see how similar scenarios have played out, and then they stop and say, “Hmm, we should probably hedge our bets here.” They don’t predict crazy edge cases. They don’t predict all-time records. Except apparently, this year they do.

If you stroll over to the ZiPS Depth Charts projections, you’ll find two Cincinnati Reds pitchers at the top of an extremely important column: hit-by-pitches. ZiPS DC expects Nick Lodolo to lead the league with 21 HBPs and Hunter Greene to be right behind him with 19. That part’s not particularly surprising. Greene led baseball with 19 HBPs in 2024, and even though he hit the IL four different times, Lodolo tied for second with 18. But Greene and Lodolo are not alone. Back in November, the Reds traded for Brady Singer, who hit 10 batters with the Royals last season and is projected to hit 10 more in 2025, tied for the 13th-highest projection. They also added Nick Martinez, one of three Reds projected to hit six batters. Then there are another five Reds projected for five HBPs. That’s eight different pitchers projected to hit at least five batters. According to Stathead, only 26 teams have ever accomplished that feat, rostering eight different pitchers who hit at least five batters. In all, ZiPS DC expects the Reds to hit 124 batters. The all-time record is 110, set by the 2022 Cincinnati Reds. The 2024 Cincinnati Reds are tied for 12th all-time with 93 (though they trailed the Mets for the NL lead by one).

Now, I need to back off this claim for a minute. If you’ve looked closely at ZiPS DC, you’ll know that the system projects more innings for each team than are actually available. The projections have the Reds throwing 1,753 innings, but over the past couple years, the average team has thrown right around 1,440. For a counting stat like this, we need to cut all our numbers by roughly 18%, and that brings the Reds’ projection down to 102 HBPs. That would still be the third-highest total in baseball history – truly a bonkers number when you consider that it’s merely their 50th percentile projection, meaning they’re just as likely to go over it as they are to go under it – but it would no longer be a record.

With 102 HBPs, the 2025 Reds would still trail the 2022 versions of themselves; back when they were so young and hopeful, and maybe even still dabbing occasionally. They’d also trail the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, whose starting rotation featured five different pitchers with at least 10 HBPs: Frank Bates (23), Jim Hughey (22), Charlie Knepper (15), Crazy Schmit (14), and Harry Colliflower (11). The Spiders Hit (by Pitch) Squad is pictured below, and I think we can all tell which one is Schmit.

We all know the case for the why the Reds might not hit their projections: injuries. Lodolo has struggled with more than his fair share of ailments, and Greene battled elbow soreness in August and September. If those two can’t combine for something like 220 innings, the Reds aren’t going to hit the record. On the other hand, nobody would call you crazy (Schmit) for expecting the Reds to blow past both the projection and the record. For starters, ZiPS DC pegs Lodolo for only 126 innings, and we’re reducing it by 18%, which brings his workload down below 104. He threw more innings than that last season, even as he made those four different trips to the IL. If Lodolo can make a full 30 starts, this thing’s in the bag, but for our purposes, he doesn’t even need to be fully healthy. If he can just be marginally healthier than he was in 2024 – and you’ll be shocked to hear this, but he’s apparently in the best shape of his life – he’s going to get a lot more innings, and no one hits more batters on a per-inning basis than Lodolo. After all, his name is literally Spanish for “I hurt it.”

Lodolo is projected to hit 1.5 batters per nine innings. Not only is that the most among all starters, it makes him one of just four starters projected to hit more than a batter per nine. The others: Chase Dollander, José Soriano, and, you guessed it, Greene. Between Hunter and I Hurt It, nominative determinism says the Reds are the team to beat (or rather, to be beaten by).

Using our fancy new historical ZiPS projections, you can also go back and look at that record-setting 2022 Reds team. You’ll find that those Reds also were projected for 124 HBPs. It’s kismet! However, if you dig down, you’ll notice that their projections were actually based on 2,439 innings; nearly a thousand more than a typical team’s workload and nearly 700 more than the 2025 Reds are projected to throw. Once you prorate their numbers for a normal 1,440-inning season, the 2022 Reds were projected to hit just 73 batters! They had to massively overperform their projections in order to plunk their way into the record books. ZiPS thinks these 2025 Reds are much, much more bloodthirsty.

The Reds are the first and oldest professional baseball team. Since 1882, Baseball Reference credits them with hitting 5,897 batters, 123 ahead of the second-place Phillies. ZiPS projects Philadelphia to plunk a paltry 58 batters this season, 44 fewer than the Reds. Even if the Reds disappoint us all and throw the ball over the plate at a non-record-breaking pace like a bunch of boring, competent belly itchers, they’re almost certain to add to their all-time lead. At least that’s what the projections say.

In 2024, after an injury to Kodai Senga, Jose Quintana was the Mets’ Opening Day starter, facing the Brewers. Now, after a list of injuries that’s way too long for an introduction paragraph, Quintana will be joining the Brewers rotation. On Monday, the Brewers and the 36-year-old left-hander agreed to a one-year deal worth $4.25 million. Robert Murray of FanSided reported the deal, and MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand broke the contract terms. As the Mets signed former Brewer Frankie Montas in December, the two teams are effectively performing their own second-hand pitcher swap.

Quintana’s deal, such as it is, makes it the big-money transaction of the offseason for the Brewers. It’s definitely not enough to make fans forget about owner Mark Attanasio’s recent comments: “Is my job to win a World Series,” he said, “or is my job to provide a summer of entertainment and passion and a way for families to come together?” (Not that it’s the purview of this particular article, but the answer to both questions, of course, is yes.) Until yesterday, Milwaukee’s priciest addition was a $1 million deal for reliever Tyler Alexander, but the team’s biggest move of the offseason is still the one that sent closer Devin Williams to the Yankees in exchange for one year of lefty starter Nestor Cortes and infield prospect Caleb Durbin. Christmas only comes once a year in Milwaukee. Read the rest of this entry »

Reader, I gasped.

Sorry, I’ve just always wanted to write that. I’ll tell you later on why I gasped. Let’s start here. Last Tuesday, while making his Grapefruit League debut with the Blue Jays, Max Scherzer challenged a pitch. Then he challenged the challenge system. Scherzer’s start against the Cardinals marked his first experience with the automated ball-strike system, which is being rolled out in some spring training facilities this year, continuing its inexorable, years-long creep toward implementation in regular season games. Scherzer, for one, does not welcome our new robot overlords.

On his 11th pitch, Scherzer fired a 1-0 fastball to Lars Nootbaar, just clipping the outside corner, at least according to home plate umpire Roberto Ortiz, an organic life form who uses an inefficient pair of weird, goo-filled orbs to assess pitches. Nootbaar – who, we should note, played some rehab games in Triple-A last season, and so was at least somewhat familiar with the challenge system – immediately patted his head. That’s the official way to request a challenge (though I would strongly encourage the league to require the player to rub their stomach with their other hand too). Scherzer, never a fan of waiting around when there’s pitching to do, canted his head from side to side like a racehorse in the starting gate. The machines spoke: The pitch was 2.3 inches off the plate, or as the humanoid Buck Martinez put it, “way outside.”

Just like Scherzer, this was my first experience with the challenge system, and I found the graphic adorable. That’s the point, I guess: implement an all-seeing eye that judges everything and everyone with detached, ruthless precision, then soften it with a lovable cartoon face. Scherzer recovered to strike out Nootbaar, then made his own challenge in the second inning. The right-hander, who tracks his pitches using the same goo-based technology as Ortiz, didn’t agree that he’d missed low with a 1-0 curveball to JJ Wetherholt, and he pounded the top of his cap like a bongo drum.

Reader, that’s when I gasped. Then I laughed. I gasp-laughed. According to the delightful ABS graphic, the pitch was hilariously low. It was nowhere near the strike zone. This pitch was in the Cactus League. It was so far away that Social Distortion wrote a song about it called “So Far Away.”

In fairness, we should acknowledge a few things. First, one of the consensuses that emerged during last year’s test of the challenge system was that team’s should disempower the pitcher from making them. Catchers are right there, and they have a much better sense of the actual location of the pitch. Second, Scherzer indicated after the game that the challenge was more an experiment than an expression of his certainty that the pitch had clipped the zone. “That was a rare occurrence for me, with a curveball down, to actually see if that’s actually a strike or not,” he said. You’re allowed to take that notion with a grain of salt. Part of me believes Scherzer, but, uh, he was bopping himself on the head with a lot of conviction.

We should also note that the steep shape of a curveball makes it hard for the pitcher in particular to judge the exact spot where it crosses the plate. The really interesting thing is that curveballs are actually relatively easy for umpires to judge. That’s not necessarily intuitive. Curveballs approach the plate at such a steep angle that they hit the catcher’s glove (or the dirt) far lower than they cross the plate, which might fool the umpire into thinking a pitch was lower than it was. And curveballs that come in at the very top of the zone leave the pitcher’s hand so high and possess such a loopy shape that they also might be hard to recognize as strikes. Where a fastball or cutter pushes straight through the zone cleanly, a breaking ball slices through it at an oblique angle, and it just seems logical that the more of the zone a pitch catches, the more likely it is that it will be recognized for doing so. But apparently that’s wrong. I broke down the 2024 stats for curveballs and fastballs (four-seamers, sinkers, and cutters) in three areas of the zone: the heart, the top and bottom of the shadow zone down the middle, and the top and bottom thirds of the zone down the middle. I’ve highlighted those areas in pink.

In all three areas, Curveballs had higher strike rates than fastballs. On pitches over the heart of the plate, it was a matter of a few tenths of a percent, but in the middle graph, curveballs were ahead 83% to 80%, and on the right it was 83% to 81%. Maybe it’s just that curveballs are easier to judge because they’re slower, but umpires are better at recognizing when they’re strikes, so in that sense Scherzer picked a bad pitch to challenge. However, much like Scherzer’s curveball, we’re drifting away from our main objective here. We’re focusing on how far the pitch was from the zone, and just to reiterate: It was far.

However, you might notice something about that graphic: There’s no distance measurement. When Nootbaar challenged in the first inning and earned his Nootbaal, the graphic zoomed way in to show us the exact size of the miss down to a tenth of an inch.

When Scherzer challenged, no measurement popped up, and I suspect that I know why. I think this is a deliberate decision made to avoid embarrassing a player who challenges a pitch that’s not particularly close. Nearly all challenges that end up as balls will show the miss distance. But if the pitch doesn’t even touch the shadow zone – that is, if it’s not even within one baseball-width of the strike zone – the graphic leaves off the exact distance so as to avoid blowing up the pitcher’s spot. Max Scherzer, trailblazer that he is, has showed us that although robots don’t feel, they can still be programmed to blush.

Don’t worry. We’re still going to blow up Scherzer’s spot. Because of all the cool graphics, it’s still really easy to get an exact measurement for pitches that land in the Zone of Embarrassment. We know the measurements of just about everything else on the screen. We know the strike zone is exactly 17 inches wide and the ball is approximately 2.9 inches wide, and through the magic of Statcast, we know that because Wetherholt is 5-foot-10, his strike zone is roughly 18.55 inches tall. I threw a screengrab into Photoshop, measured each of those constants, then used the ratio of pixels to inches to calculate the distance. The ball was 3.98 inches from the strike zone. It missed the shadow zone by more than an inch. It crossed the plate just over a foot off the ground.

That looks pretty damning, but allow me to blow your mind for a moment. If we’re being fair to Scherzer, we need to acknowledge that the pitch was actually much closer to the rulebook strike zone than Statcast makes it look. Let’s think about it under the rules of the current, non-computerized strike zone. Keep in mind that this was a curveball breaking downward. Now let’s look at the way that the Hawkeye cameras measure a pitch, courtesy of an MLB.com explainer by Anthony Castrovince.

Keep your eye on the diagram on the right. Statcast’s strike zone is two-dimensional, and it’s measured from the very center of home plate. That’s a perfectly reasonable way to design an ABS system – an earlier version was 3-D, so it seems safe to assume that this 2-D version is, for some tangible reason, an improvement upon it – but it’s not the way the strike zone has worked for the entirety of baseball history, including right now. The rulebook definition starts like this: “The STRIKE ZONE is that area over home plate…” and that’s really all we need to know. The strike zone is three-dimensional. It’s seven-sided, a pentagonal prism, and the ball just needs to clip any part of it in order to be a strike.

At The Athletic, Jayson Stark had the good fortune to be present in the clubhouse after the game, when Scherzer found out that the robo-zone didn’t match the rulebook zone: “Wait, I thought it was the whole plate,” he said. “So now we have to redefine what the strike zone is? You said it was a 3-D zone. Now we’ve got a 2-D zone? Hasn’t it always been a 3-D zone?” The answer to that question is yes. It has always been a 3-D zone and it still is, but now there’s also a 2-D zone. There are two strike zones. We’ll dig into the philosophical implications of this dichotomy later, but for now, that’s how umpires are judging pitches, so why don’t we try measuring things that way?

Let’s start with how curveballs work. Their path gets steeper and steeper as they approach the plate. There are plenty of reasons for this. Curveballs actually leave the pitcher’s hand traveling slightly upward; the classic way to recognize a curveball is seeing it jump up out of the pitcher’s hand. The magnus force created by the ball’s topspin pulls it downward, and that force compounds upon itself over the length of the pitch. Here’s where it starts. The baseball is traveling horizontally, and the topspin interacts with the air to start pulling it down.

Now it’s traveling at a steeper angle, but guess what? The topspin is still pulling it downward, so its angle is going to keep getting steeper and steeper as it goes.

Moreover, gravity amplifies this effect for a pitch that’s always breaking downward. Air resistance slows the pitch down as it nears the plate, but gravity is pulling the pitch downward at a constant rate. So say it takes a tenth of a second for the ball to travel the first 10 feet toward home plate, and in that time, gravity pulls it down five centimeters. By the time it reaches the plate, it’s going slower, so over the last tenth of a second, it only travels eight feet, but gravity is still pulling it down five centimeters. All the numbers in this example were completely made up, but you get the point; the ratio of downward movement to horizontal movement is increasing. A curveball’s approach angle keeps getting steeper. You can see it in Statcast’s 3-D pitch visualizations.

These are two actual Scherzer curveballs from last year. We’re going to focus on the bottom one, which came in a bit below the plate. The red line shows a straight line between the position of the ball when it crosses home plate and the position when it’s 50 feet away.

Now, let’s zoom in and look at the path of the pitch over the last few feet of its journey. As you can see, our new purple line is significantly steeper.

None of this should be particularly surprising if you’re familiar with Alex Chamberlain’s primer on vertical approach angle, but the point is that curveballs, with their sharp downward movement compounded by gravity, are the steepest pitches of all. According to Alex’s pitch leaderboard, Scherzer’s curveball averaged a vertical approach angle of -9.9 degrees last season. For now, let’s assume this pitch had the same VAA. With help from our friend Pythagoras, we can calculate that a pitch traveling at an angle of -9.9 degrees would be 1.48 inches higher when it crossed the front of the plate than when it crossed the middle of the plate. Here’s how that works.

OK, so measuring at the front of the plate, the pitch comes in 1.48 inches higher. It’s now missing the zone by just 2.50 inches. It’s well within the shadow zone. That certainly makes it sound a little closer, don’t you think? Here’s what that looks like in our original diagram.

You know what? It’s still pretty far away from the strike zone. Stark’s article mentioned that after the game, reporters told Scherzer that his pitch would have been a strike according to a 3-D zone. They were way off base. In order to do so, the pitch would have had to arrive at the plate with an absurd VAA of 25 degrees. That ain’t happening. This pitch is still unequivocally a ball. There’s no system – goo-based, camera-based, vibes-based, none – in which this pitch hits in the strike zone. It was so far away that Carole King wrote a different song about it, also called “So Far Away.”

That said, I do suspect that this particular curveball actually had a steeper VAA than -9.9 degrees, making it a bit closer than the graphic above indicates. Just using the old-fashioned goo-orb test, it looked sharper than the typical Scherzer curveball. Second, I was talking things over with Michael Rosen, our resident pitching genius, and he got curious and pulled data for a Scherzer curveball, just one random curve from 2023. That pitch had a VAA of -10.1 degrees over the last 10 feet.

That VAA would move Scherzer’s pitch a few hundredths of an inch closer to the zone, and this one solitary, particularly sharp curve could’ve been even closer. It’s still not a strike according to any definition of the strike zone, but it highlights the disconnect between the two current competing versions.

So far we’ve only been talking about the front of the plate, but this would also be true of both the back and the sides. A pitch with a steep horizontal approach angle can clip the corner of the plate before it reaches the midpoint. The back gets tricky because of the plate’s pentagonal shape, but it’s still possible; the closer to the center a high pitch is located, the better a chance it will have of dropping down and catching a piece of the rulebook zone. ABS would tell you that every one of the pitches illustrated below is a ball. But according to a normal three-dimensional strike zone – which is what umpires are calling – that’s not actually true. It’s smaller than the rulebook zone.

As things stand, when the league does implement an ABS challenge system for regular season play – and at this point, that seems like a virtual certainty, though which regular season is still undecided – then the game will officially have two different strike zones. It’s possible that the league could change the rulebook definition for umpires so that it matches the Statcast zone, but that strikes me as unlikely for many reasons, chief among them it would essentially turn the iconic shape of home plate into a vestigial appendage. In the two-zone world – the world that Triple-A players have been living in for a while now – a pitcher would be able to throw a strike, get robbed by the umpire, challenge that incorrect call, and lose the challenge because according to the robot umpire, the pitch really was a ball. Even crazier, the pitcher will throw a strike, the umpire will get the call right, and then the batter will challenge it and that correct call will get overturned! The umpire and the computer will make two different calls, and both will be correct because they’ll have two different zones.

As the numbers from our curveball example show, we’re not talking about a couple of unlikely edge cases. The differences in movement from the front and back of the plate to the middle aren’t minuscule. Some pitchers’ curves average above 11 degrees of VAA, and the sweepiest sweepers average more than six degrees of horizontal approach angle. We’re often going to be talking about well over an inch of difference. This is going to happen all the time. I’m not the first person to notice this. On Wednesday, Baseball Savant’s Tom Tango crunched the numbers and announced that in 2024, one percent of all takes would have fallen into this category, just for issues with the front and back of the plate.

As things look right now, baseball will soon officially have a human strike zone and a robot strike zone. The robot strike zone will be so thin as to be non-existent, while the human strike zone, as it always has, will be shaped like an infinite number of infinitely thin home plates. Honestly, I don’t know how any pitcher who’s had it fully explained to them will avoid succumbing to paralysis halfway through their windup and toppling off the mound simply because they’ve exhausted their ability to process the disjuncture of the situation.

I mentioned earlier that setting up the robo-zone in two dimensions rather than three was a perfectly reasonable choice. The more I think about it, however, the more I think it might be the only reasonable choice. Calling balls and strikes is incredibly difficult. I’ve had to do it before, and I’d approximate that I felt 100% certain on about 30% of the pitches I called. But even then, I doubt I was really thinking about the strike zone the way the rulebook demands. The rulebook zone doesn’t have four corners; it has 10 corners. And it doesn’t have an edge; it has 15 edges. The difference between a two-dimensional plane and a three-dimensional space is the difference between a topographical map and a mountain.

On the one hand, this makes me wish the robo-zone were three-dimensional, just because I’m imagining how much more fun the challenge graphics would be. We’d see in precise cartoon glory not just whether the ball nicked the corner of a box, but one particular corner of a 10-cornered pentagonal prism. It would rule. On the other hand, it’s absolutely preposterous that we ask human beings to process information with anything approaching this level of precision. Wherever you’re sitting right now, try to imagine a pentagonal prism floating in the air next to you. Now try to picture yourself deciding whether a Tarik Skubal fastball nicked one of its seven sides. Now do it again, but first squish your prism down a bit because Nick Madrigal is up next. So maybe it does make sense to have two zones; we’ve just got them reversed.

Scherzer was candid and engaging with reporters, and after processing all of this information, he closed with the takeaway that most of us saw in the headlines: “Can we just play baseball?” he asked. “We’re humans. Can we just be judged by humans? Do we really need to disrupt the game? I think humans are defined by humans.” When he puts it that way, it’s a pretty reasonable request. Right now, umpires and batters track pitches using the exact same equipment, and that makes plenty of sense. If the game is played by humans, it’s certainly not laughable to feel that human eyes and brains should be deciding what’s a strike and what’s a ball. I don’t mean to say that there’s wisdom in every mistake simply because it’s made by a human, but once a computer is making the decisions, the objective of the game becomes slightly less fun, for the same reason that playing chess against the computer isn’t particularly enjoyable. It becomes less of a game and more of a problem solving exercise.

These days, there’s no end to the ways that computer programs are judging us – CAPTCHA requests, Spotify recommendations, suspicious login emails, targeted advertising, personalized search results, automated insurance denials, the artificially indiscriminate firings going on throughout the federal government – and with vanishingly few exceptions, the people being judged would like nothing better than to smash all of these robot judges with a hammer.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to smash the computers that turned Google into such a joke with a hammer, but the difference here is that many of those systems were designed as shortcuts, either to save time, to replace human workers, or to shift accountability away from the person instituting a crappy policy and onto the circuit board that implements it. On the other hand, the challenge system is a particularly elegant solution to the problem at hand. It will introduce an extra layer of accountability into umpiring without replacing the umpires or undermining their centrality to the game. It won’t obliterate the value of pitch framing, but it will hopefully reduce the amount of shouting umpires have to bear. Now that we have the ability to know the exact location of every pitch, it’s probably not completely defensible to just ignore that knowledge. Instant replay was instituted for the same reason. “I like it when somebody screws up and somebody gets screwed over” is not exactly a winning campaign pitch.

Let me hit you with one last disconnect. The really funny thing is that depending on how you look at it, Scherzer is both the best and worst messenger for this argument. He’s a sure-fire Hall of Famer and a longtime union rep. He’s not afraid of a fight, and his standing in the game ensures that when he speaks, people will listen. His comments warrant plenty of counterarguments, but “Max Scherzer doesn’t know what he’s talking about” is not among them.

On the other hand, Scherzer has never had that much use for umpires in the first place. Since Sports Info Solution started tracking pitches in 2002, 328 pitchers have thrown at least 800 innings. Scherzer’s 14% swinging strike rate ranks ninth among them and his 27% whiff rate ranks 19th. His 17% called strike rate, however, ranks all the way down at 212th. Scherzer has always succeeded by racking up whiffs, pumping his fastball by hitters and tempting them into chasing sliders and curves. Relying on the umpire for called strikes has never remotely been his game. In fact, since 2008, Statcast says he’s had 1,262 would-be strikes stolen from him, third-most in all of baseball. Few players have relied less on human umpires or accumulated more reasons to be fed up with them than Scherzer. Maybe we should tell him that after his next start. I’m sure he’ll have something interesting to say about it.