If the winter is a time for dreams, the spring is a time for solutions. Your team may have been going after Juan Soto or Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani, depending on the offseason, but short of something going weird in free agency (like the unsigned Boras clients last year), if you don’t have them under contract at this point, they’ll be improving someone else’s club. However, that doesn’t mean that spring training is only about ramping up for the daily grind. Teams have real needs to address, and while they’re no doubt workshopping their own solutions – or possibly convincing themselves that the problem doesn’t exist, like when I wonder why my acid reflux is awful after some spicy food – that doesn’t mean that we can’t cook up some ideas in the FanGraphs test kitchen.

This is the final piece in a three-part series in which I’ll propose one way for each team to fill a roster hole or improve for future seasons. Some of my solutions are more likely to happen than others, but I tried to say away from the completely implausible ones. We’ll leave the hypothetical trades for Bobby Witt Jr. and Paul Skenes to WFAN callers. Also, I will not recommend the same fix for different teams; in real life, for example, David Robertson can help only one club’s bullpen. I wrote about the teams in the two East divisions last Wednesday, and then covered the Central divisions on Friday. Today, we’ll tackle the 10 teams in the West divisions, beginning with the five in the AL West before moving on to their counterparts in the NL West. Each division is sorted by the current Depth Charts projected win totals.

Texas Rangers: Reunite with Kyle Gibson
Look at the Rangers in our Depth Charts projection and glance down at the pitchers. Do you see a problem? We project the Rangers to have a decent rotation, right at the back of the top 10, but that also relies on a lot of innings from pitchers who have not been able to throw many in recent years. Jacob deGrom and Tyler Mahle are both projected to throw more innings apiece than the two of them have thrown combined over the last two years. I’d love to see 270 innings from deGrom and Mahle, but to count on that is just begging for a sad story. I probably believe in Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter more than most, but neither of them should be counted on to solidify an injury-depleted rotation in 2025.

The Rangers need a reliable innings-eater, and old friend Kyle Gibson is still out there. He has made at least 30 starts in five of the last six full seasons, with the one time he didn’t reach that threshold coming in 2019, when he made 29 starts, appeared in 34 games, and put up 2.6 WAR across 160 innings — the fewest innings he’s thrown in that span, excluding 2020. He’s probably never again going to be as good as he was in 2021, when he was an All-Star with Texas before getting traded to the Phillies and finished with a 3.71 ERA, a 3.87 FIP, and 3.1 WAR, but Gibson comes with a fairly high floor. His performance last year with the Cardinals (4.24 ERA, 4.42 FIP, 1.5 WAR, 169 2/3 innings) was his least-productive campaign during that 2018-2024 stretch, but even that would benefit the Rangers right now.

Seattle Mariners: Add some Tork to the lineup
The Mariners have gotten more out of Luke Raley than they’ve had any right to, but he remains a platoon first baseman, with a .575 OPS in the majors against lefties. Even if he can do better than that — ZiPS thinks he’ll put up about a hundred more points of OPS in 2025 — he’s not David Ortiz against righties, so it’s hard to just give him a full-time job at first. The likely candidates to pair with Raley are thoroughly uninteresting, so why not look at Spencer Torkelson, a player who is just begging for a change of scenery? The Tigers have clearly soured on him; otherwise, they likely would not have signed second baseman Gleyber Torres and moved Colt Keith to first base to start there over Torkelson. He’s still young enough to have some upside and get things back on track, but even if he doesn’t ever reach his full potential, he ought to at least beat up on lefties. The Mariners could use more power, and I doubt the price tag will be high.

Houston Astros: Add a very boring arm
The Astros dug themselves a hole early on in 2024, in large part because of a spate of pitching injuries that tested their depth to the breaking point. Houston’s rotation ought to be good, but there still are a number of pitchers with injury concerns, once again leaving the team vulnerable to some bad health luck. The Astros could use some veteran depth to preemptively reinforce the rotation just in case someone goes down, and I think for them, Lance Lynn is the most interesting free agent still available.

The Astros are skilled at refining pitch arsenals, for both prospects and veterans, and Lynn has the weirdest repertoire of the remaining free-agent starters. Rather than the standard fastball-breaking-offspeed mix, Lynn basically throws a bunch of slightly-to-moderately different fastballs, making him the type of pitcher who could benefit from Houston’s wizardry. A sweeper could cause some additional tension for batters compared to his cutter, and he’s never really had a refined offspeed offering to use as a putaway pitch against lefties. The specifics would be for the Astros to figure out. Lynn also has expressed a willingness to pitch out of the bullpen after teams started inquiring about using him as a reliever, so even if Houston’s rotation remains in tact for the whole season, Lynn could still have a role.

Athletics: Get Sandy before heading to the desert
The good: The A’s actually spent some money this winter. The bad: We still project the A’s to have a losing record. The really bad: Our Depth Charts project the A’s to have a worse starting rotation than the White Sox. The Marlins are clearly in the shopping mood, having already sent away Jesús Luzardo, and with teams likely waiting to see how Sandy Alcantara fares after returning from Tommy John surgery, the A’s have an opportunity to jump the 2022 NL Cy Young’s trade market and steal a march on the better wild card contenders. A potential wrinkle here: The Yankees may be in the market for Alcantara now that Gerrit Cole is going to miss the 2025 season while recovering from Tommy John surgery. Still, the A’s shouldn’t let that deter them from targeting an ace at a time when he could be relatively affordable.

Los Angeles Angels: Hire a team of archaeologists to design a very complex treasure hunt that convinces Arte Moreno to sell the team so that he’s free to go on an Indiana Jones adventure
I admit it, I’m at a loss for words with the Angels. In some ways, they’re actually worse off than the White Sox, in that Chicago at least has a reasonable long-term plan while the Angels keep teetering between strategies that are either unclear, unrealistic, or both. Their moves reflect their extreme short-term thinking, leaving the organization without a coherent path to winning now or winning later. Leadership has to come from the top, and Moreno continues to show he is incapable of fixing things. Case in point: The Halos spent this offseason adding veteran depth pieces. These would’ve been smart moves if the Angels were already a good team and looking to patch up their few remaining areas of weakness. That, of course, is not the case. The Angels need to accept that they’re lost before they can move forward and begin to assemble a winning team while Mike Trout is still around. But as long as they keep following an ineffective leader, they’re going to keep walking in circles.

Los Angeles Dodgers: Find a weird reclamation project
This one was a struggle because the Dodgers, while not having the highest median win projection of any team in ZiPS history (that’s still the 2021 Dodgers), they have the highest floor, with no obvious weaknesses anywhere. I guess the one thing the Dodgers are missing is that random broken-down reliever that you forget still plays baseball until they inevitably fix him. I’d love to see if Daniel Bard has another improbable comeback left in him, or maybe Adam Cimber, because a star in the sky disappears whenever a sidearmer loses his job.

Arizona Diamondbacks: See if the Yankees are interested in Jordan Montgomery
As I mentioned in the A’s section, Cole’s Tommy John surgery is a massive blow to the Yankees as they look to defend their American League pennant in 2025. Will Warren has a good shot at being a pretty solid rotation fill-in, but with Luis Gil also out for a while and Nestor Cortes now on the Brewers, the team now has just about zero starting pitching depth left. Jordan Montgomery and the Yankees have a good history, and there’s an obvious need now. Montgomery really struggled in 2024, to the point that Arizona owner Ken Kendrick said publicly that adding the lefty was a “horrible signing.” The Diamondbacks also have plenty of rotation options, so many, in fact, that RosterResource currently projects Montgomery to pitch out of their bullpen. They surely won’t get much in return for him, and they should be prepared to eat a good chunk of his remaining salary, but if they want to move on from him and maybe even get a prospect or two in return, this is the way to do it.

San Diego Padres: Sign David Robertson
The Padres’ bullpen is hardly a dumpster fire, but it is kind of top-heavy, and we project everybody after the fifth option (Yuki Matsui) to be at or below replacement level. There’s not a lot of financial flexibility right now in San Diego for various reasons we won’t go into here, but if the Padres are looking for marginal gains on a budget, David Robertson is by far the best move they could make. They shouldn’t have to spend much to get him, considering he’s 40 years old and remains unsigned in the second week of March, but he is coming off a very good season and is comfortable pitching in a variety of bullpen roles.

San Francisco Giants: Inquire about Jesús Sánchez
The Giants are likely a tier below the Diamondbacks and Padres in the NL Wild Card race, but they’re still close enough that short-term improvements matter. San Francisco’s designated hitter spot is bleak, and the player we have getting the most plate appearances there, Jerar Encarnacion, was in an indie league for much of last season and put up a .277 on-base percentage in the majors. The Giants should see what it would take to get Jesús Sánchez from the Marlins. He’s never developed into a big home run hitter despite solid hard-hit numbers, in large part because he’s never generated much loft. He’s also a spray hitter, and last season, 13 of his 25 doubles were line drives hit the opposite way. It’s the type of game that could be better suited for the spacious Oracle Park. Sánchez would provide a left-handed complement to Encarnacion, and he’s good enough to play all three outfield positions if needed.

Colorado Rockies: Find the next Nolan Jones and Brenton Doyle
Since the departure of former GM Jeff Bridich, the Rockies have made quite a bit of progress in no longer treating prospects as annoyances, and they now give internal, lesser prospects chances to surprise them. The last bit is important, as the Rockies of five or six years ago would never have given someone like Nolan Jones or Brenton Doyle enough playing time to break out in the majors. Doyle hit 23 homers and stole 30 bases in 2024 while winning his second Gold Glove in as many seasons, and although Jones struggled last year, he was hurt on and off and should be expected to at least split the difference between that performance and his 2023 production.

Considering this, the Rockies should go full-carrion bird as the season approaches. Colorado ought to be in on any and all mildly interesting players who are shut out of major league opportunities in 2025. Among the guys the Rockies should target are Mickey Gasper, Edouard Julien, Addison Barger, Shay Whitcomb, Curtis Mead, and Leo Jiménez. They may never develop into stars, but the Rockies need to be willing to throw everything at the wall and hope to find at least a few productive players.

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Detroit Tigers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Expecting the worst only takes out so much of the sting when it happens. As if the baseball world needed any reminder, the Yankees announced on Monday evening that Gerrit Cole is bound for Tommy John surgery.

This had seemed inevitable since Cole felt discomfort after leaving his start against the Twins on Thursday and went for an MRI. The Yankees and their ace received a second opinion from Dr. Neal ElAttrache, obviously hoping for something along the lines of “Oh wait, that other doctor was reading this upside-down, he’s fine.” What they got was an appointment for surgery on Tuesday in Los Angeles. Read the rest of this entry »

Something might be brewing in Sacramento. The 2024 A’s beat expectations by a mile, though expectations were admittedly muted coming off of a disastrous 2023, and this offseason has seen the club be quite busy. The team’s best player, Brent Rooker, signed an extension that will keep him around through at least 2029, well past when the A’s are scheduled to move to Las Vegas. The pitching staff looks much improved, thanks to the surprise signing of Luis Severino and a trade for Jeffrey Springs. And now last year’s second-best player, Lawrence Butler, has signed a contract extension too:

BREAKING: Outfielder Lawrence Butler and the A’s are in agreement on a seven-year, $66.5 million contract extension with one club option, sources tell ESPN. Butler, 24, broke out as a rookie last year and is seen as a foundational player for the A’s moving forward.

— Jeff Passan (@jeffpasan.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T04:22:52.566Z

A year ago, this contract would have been mind-boggling. Butler debuted in the bigs in 2023 with an uneven two months of work. His minor league track record suggested intriguing upside – he flashed excellent power while climbing the ranks and was only in a position to struggle in the majors because he’d reached Triple-A at age 22 – but like so many A’s, he was a question mark, a talented youngster with some good signs and some red flags.

The A’s started 2024 hot, at least by their standards, but Butler didn’t. After breaking camp with the team, he ran into a huge power outage. Over 121 plate appearances, he managed just two homers en route to a .179/.281/.274 slash line, so the A’s sent him back down to Triple-A. What can you do? Sometimes your 23-year-old who never played above A-ball until a year ago needs a bit of extra seasoning. Read the rest of this entry »

Quinn Priester is poised to take that next step and live up to his first-round pedigree. Opportunity paired with increased octane are among the reasons why. Drafted 18th overall by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2019 out of Cary-Grove High School, the erstwhile Illinois prep stands a good chance of breaking camp in the Red Sox starting rotation. With Brayan Bello (shoulder) and Kutter Crawford (knee) likely to begin the season the injured list, Priester is well positioned to help fill the void.

The enhanced heater factors heavily into his hoped-for emergence as an established big-league hurler. The 24-year-old right-hander’s two-seamer averaged 93.1 mph last year, and this spring it has consistently been a few ticks higher. In his last outing, Priester topped out at 97.

“The cutter is getting better, but more than anything it’s been the velocity piece,” Priester said of his recent developmental strides. “We’re trying to see that trend upwards, and hold throughout games. I want to be 96-plus with the sinker, and then let everything else complement that pitch.”

Added muscle has contributed to the additional oomph. Acquired by Boston at last summer’s trade deadline in exchange for Nick Yorke, Priester currently carries 220 pounds on his 6-foot-3 frame, 10 more than a year ago. He’s evolving in other ways, as well. Increasingly mature, he’s learning the nuances of his craft. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Atlanta Braves. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

As I write this, the winter free agency period has essentially drawn to a close. Out of the top 50 free agents I highlighted before the offseason began, 48 have found homes — sorry, David Robertson and Kyle Gibson. Per RosterResource, only five free agents – including the two holdovers from the top 50 – accrued 1 WAR or more in 2024 and haven’t yet signed new deals. In other words, all the signing that is going to happen basically has, so it’s time to look back and see how you and I did at predicting the deals players would sign.

I like to evaluate my own predictions in service of making better ones in the future, dividing them up into a few categories. First, I break signings down by position, because the market for relievers and second basemen is different. Second, I look at both average annual value and total guarantee. There’s no set ratio for how to relate those two, so looking at each independently seems best to me. Finally, I look at both the individual predictions (how close to the actual contract that a player signed my predictions came), as well as the overall trend (how my aggregate predictions for each position group did compared to the total amount they received).

This year, I made all of that back-checking more rigorous. I put all of my predictions, as well as every crowdsourced one, into a giant spreadsheet. I noted all the contracts that were signed, made adjustments for deferrals, and ignored non-guaranteed money. I compared each actual contract to our predictions. I also gathered some of the best non-FanGraphs predictions I could find, looking to outlets like ESPN, The Athletic, and MLB Trade Rumors. Below, you’ll find how both the crowd (you) and I did, as well as the best non-FanGraphs entrant in each category. Read the rest of this entry »

When David Appelman announced on Monday that we were adding college stats to our player pages and leaderboards, more than one person reached out to congratulate me personally. I had nothing to do with the conception or implementation of this blessed happening, but it is true: FanGraphs having college stats could not be more up my alley.

I wanted to play around with the new leaderboard, but this early in the season, there’s little to be gleaned. No pitcher has made more than four starts; no team has played more than 14 games. And most of the action we’ve seen so far has been nonconference throat-clearing, mismatches between blue bloods and mid-majors. The numbers will tell, but not for another few weeks.

So I decided to go back to the roots of the sabermetrics movement. Our college leaderboards might not have all the latest fancy Statcast stuff, but we’ve got FIP and K% and all sorts of things you wouldn’t take for granted if you’ve ever had to calculate a pitcher’s WHIP by hand on the back of a box score in a MAC press box. When we got all that stuff in the pro game, what did we do with it?

That’s right, relitigate award voting. Read the rest of this entry »

I got my start in baseball writing as a Cardinals blogger. That’s only natural – I’m a Cardinals fan. My dad grew up in St. Louis and passed it on to me. I’m still a fan, though certainly less than I was before I started writing about the sport as my full-time job. But whether you’re looking at it through the lens of a fan or just as an analyst, the trajectory of this always-competing, never-quite-dominant team has been fascinating to watch.

I had a strange feeling while watching the Redbirds last year. I kept wondering, “Why is this team full of old guys?” Ever since the 2011 World Series win, Albert Pujols’ first finale in St. Louis, the team always seemed full of young, devil-magicky contributors. An average Cards roster had a few recognizable stars plus a bunch of young guys you’d never heard of who were way better than you initially realized. Matt Carpenter and Michael Wacha were unexpected stars in 2013. Carlos Martínez and Kolten Wong came on strong. After a few years of missing the playoffs despite interesting young contributors (Tommy Pham, Randal Grichuk, Luke Weaver), the 2019 Cards coalesced around Jack Flaherty, Tommy Edman, and Paul DeJong.

You’ve heard of all of those players, of course, but at the time, they were young up-and-comers. The Cardinals never seemed to be old despite running out Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright year after year. Those guys were a key veteran core, helping to spread the team gospel to the young horde backing them up. But even with those old hands running things, my view of the Cards as a youthful outfit was correct. From 2013 through 2018, St. Louis’ roster was younger than average every year. Then they were ever so slightly older than league average in 2019 and again in 2020. 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.