Photo Credit: Kirk Nawrotzky | Richmond Flying Squirrels
Happy Labor Day everybody! We’ve made it to the final holiday tentpole of the baseball season. Please accept my wishes to enjoy the holiday with your loved ones as you will, whether grilling burgers and tater tots or engaging in friendly arguments over the appropriate ranking of Samuel Gompers, Mother Jones, and Cesar Chavez in your personal labor iconography.
Before we get into the weekend’s activities, a story came out at the end of last week that I wanted to focus on for a couple of different reasons. Baseball America’s Editor-in-Chief, J.J. Cooper did the reporting work on this, and, as is typical of all of J.J.’s work, it’s well worth reading in full. In a conference call with Farm Directors from all 30 clubs, MLB informed the teams that it planned to make a few tweaks over the final few weeks of the season to the ABS system being used in Triple A.
The ABS change will affect how the strike zone is determined for each batter. Heretofore that determination has been made based on a calculation based on each player’s listed height, taking a percentage of that height to determine a standard top and bottom of the strike zone. Of course, not every 6’1” body is the same, and this has led to feedback that the strike zone wasn’t taking individual bodies into account — and it made no attempt to take a batter’s stance into account. That is now going to change, with the ABS system being based off of the Hawk Eye system, which monitors every movement on the field and has the ability to track limbs. The new strike zone will be specific to each player, with a top of the zone set at the width of two baseballs above the player’s hips and the bottom at the players’ knees. This should lead to a strike zone that hews more closely to the rulebook definition.
Buried within that story, however, is another one. As Cooper notes, the new strike zone is intended to align more closely with a human called strike zone, however it is still designed to be lower than the major league strike zone. As Cooper writes:
That lower top end of the zone was intentionally designed into the new Triple-A strike zone to see if it would reduce the number of strikeouts on riding four-seam fastballs on the top of the zone. It has helped to reduce strikeouts by a modest amount, but in doing so it has also upped the walk rate by roughly twice the number of reduced strikeouts.
It bears noting that the Giants have a number of pitchers in Triple A whose games revolve around getting strikeouts with fastballs at the top of the zone — Kyle Harrison and Cole Waites among them — who obviously were impacted by this experiment.
It’s a tough situation to be in. MLB needs data to understand how some potential new rules or technologies might impact the game (in beneficial or detrimental ways), but they can’t get that data without turning some minor leaguers into lab rats while they’re trying to put up performances that will help them gain the big leagues.
For what it’s worth, Harrison told The Athletic’s Eno Sarris that he believed the lower zone helped him refine his fastball control, but it’s still worth keeping in mind when you look at his walk rates this year that they were, to some degree, engineered by MLB.
(Don’t try to click on the tweet below, it’s just an image, you can find the story here)
The change to the pitch clock, by the way, will do away with the distinction between men on base and no men on base, setting the clock at 17 seconds between each pitch regardless. Previously, it had been set at 14 seconds with nobody on, and 19 seconds once a batter reached base.
HITTER of the WEEKEND: Heliot Ramos (Sac), 6 /10, 2 HR (14), 2b, 4 RBI, 4 BB, 2 K
PITCHER of the WEEKEND: Sean Hjelle (Sac), 5.1 IP, 2 H, 3 R, 1 ER, 3 BB, 5 K
Let’s take a stroll around the events of the weekend starting with a salute to a repeat 20/20 man!
Last year, Tyler Fitzgerald was one of three 20/20 players on the farm, but he’s in a class of his own in 2023, as nobody else is going to ascend the twin peaks. He became the second 20 HR player in the org on Sunday — and it’s going to take some hot spurts for anybody else to join in the club. Combined with his 26 SB on the year, he’s reached a power-speed milestone combo for two consecutive seasons. Congrats, Tyler!
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