I remember that evening well. I was 15 years old and reporting to the pre-season umpire meeting for my first paying job. After a talk by the lead supervisor, I received a face mask, t-shirt, indicator (to record balls, strikes, and outs by hand), and scorecards (an umpire’s version of time sheets). One of the more veteran kids told me something to the effect that “remember, you get paid by the game, not by the hour”. Good advice. From that day forward, I always made sure that when I served as a home plate umpire, I called, when possible, a fair amount of strikes. Some might call it a wide zone. I thought of it as my gift to those attending youth baseball games.

In the early days of baseball, there was no such thing as a “ball”. Pitchers were instructed to make sure the batters hit the baseball. Since pitchers didn’t always comply, organized baseball soon began to penalize a pitcher for throwing three unhittable pitches and deemed it a ball. A pitcher was allowed only three “balls” per batter. In effect, it would take nine errant pitches to advance the batter to first base. By 1880 eight unfair pitches became a base on balls, and in 1884 six were required. It wasn’t until 1887 when the National League and its companion league, the American Association, actually agreed to a strike zone. In 1889, baseball finally mandated that four balls outside the strike zone would constitute a walk.

For a pitcher, it’s so important to throw strikes. I still remember the words from my managers in the dugout when I walked a batter, “we can’t help you if you walk them”. Indeed, how many times do you find yourself grimacing when your favorite team’s pitcher walks a leadoff batter to begin an inning?! Statistics bear out the importance of it. A key metric in “The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball” authored by three baseball historians is “run expectancy”. The metric looks at the 24 possible baserunner/out scenarios, for example, bases empty with no outs. In that case, a team has a 46.1% chance of scoring a run in any given inning. When the leadoff batter walks, the run expectancy jumps to 83.1% and the anguish for the fielding team begins.

With the advent of the automatic balls strikes (ABS) system this year, we now have a new dynamic in calling balls and strikes. No longer is the pace of the game solely in the hands of whether a home plate umpire is a “pitcher’s ump” or a “hitter’s ump”, but technology is literally looking over our shoulders. MLB has had to rewrite the strike zone to accommodate ABS. The Official Rules of Baseball has long maintained that the strike zone is from the middle of a batter’s torso to just below his kneecap, leaving much discretion in how an umpire sees the zone in the batter’s stance. Now, it’s much more precise. The zone starts at 27% of a batter’s height and stretches to 53.5%, top to bottom. In width, the ABS zone is, of course, 17 inches wide, matching the width of home plate.

What’s the impact of the new ABS strike zone? In April batters took walks in historic numbers. Walk rates were around 10%, a 16% hike over 2025. The trend indicates that in 2026 we may see the highest walk rate in 75 years. Some teams are clearly taking advantage of the new zone, including the Yankees, Brewers, and Angels, which are averaging over 12% of the team at-bats. And the craziest numbers are the individual ones. These MLB stars are walking an unbelievable amount of times to the plate – Mike Trout, Angels (73.9%); Ben Rice, Yankees (62.2%); Munetaka Murakami, White Sox (59.8%); and Nick Kurtz, Athletics (57.8%).

What is the player’s reaction to the new strike zone? It depends on whom you ask. James McCann, Arizona’s catcher, believes that the zone is “tighter than usual” because umpires are receiving much feedback on whether a pitch is a strike or a ball. Pitcher Paul Sewald, also of the Diamondbacks, admitted that “it is a tough time to be a pitcher”, joking that there are “balls flying everywhere”. The hitters see it a little differently. The Yankees’ Cody Bellinger calls the April increase in walks a “short sample size”. The Cubs’ Nico Hoerner noted that hitters are benefitting short term by laying off pitches at the top of the zone but adjustments will soon be made.

Have we seen a rules change similarly impact the game before? Most definitely. Reacting to the dominance of pitchers in the 1960s era, most particularly Bob Gibson’s record 1.12 ERA in 1968, MLB lowered the mound for the 1969 season. The walk rate increased from 7.6% to 9.1%. We all remember the effect of the new pitch clock rule in 2023. Stolen bases skyrocketed in 2023 and remain high, even after teams have had three years to adjust.

What’s interesting about the new ABS zone is that it seems to run counter to the MLB objective that triggered the pitch clock rule – speed up the game! The early numbers, based on April play, show that games are being played on an average of 2 hours, 42 minutes, about six minutes more than the 2024 and 2025 pace. Yes, it’s slight, but something to be mindful of, especially when baseball is doing all it can to spur fan interest.

I’ve seen most recently a couple videos of home plate umpires responding to dugouts disputing called balls and strikes with the words “challenge me”! Yes, if the team hasn’t run its course on the number of challenges it has that game, the batter, catcher, or pitcher could have certainly challenged the call. But, for me, it seems like umpires are thinking of the ABS system as overreaching and they are more brazen than usual. Maybe the new advice to umpires is not that you aren’t paid by the hour, but rather call the game in a way that they won’t challenge you.

Until next Monday,

your Baseball Bench Coach