Matt Gelb

The lefty outside corner to me so far has been among the loudest ones, as I've articulated.

We know that the very top of the zone has shrunk for everybody by a couple inches.

And so that's obviously an enormous component of a lot of the things that you're seeing this year.

But a lot of these things were controlled for in advance because we did have all that AAA data already, not just from the ABS perspective, but from what the strike zone is going to look like perspective.

I think you hit the nail on the head insofar as we've seen pitchers required to go inside the strike zone this year in a way that they've never really had to before, which sort of buttresses my theory that the pitchers that are going to be most advantaged in this world are stuffy pitchers.

for lack of a better term, and the ones who are most going to suffer are those who major in guile, as I like to say.

And so, look, there's no world in which Jacob Mizorowski was not going to shove, but if you're looking for what the next wave of great pitching looks like, it's going to look a lot less like, I don't know, Ranger Suarez, a lot more like...

Jacob Mizorowski, and those might be extreme examples, but ultimately, if the strike zone is smaller than it's quite literally ever been, it goes without saying that if you're going to try and nibble, that's a really tight balance beam on which to stand, whereas Jacob Mizorowski can tell you, I'm throwing this pitch that you perceive at 104 miles per hour in the heart of the plate, and you're not going to touch it anyway.

Again, there was never a time in baseball history where that was not going to work.

I would say that notion is especially pronounced in this world where you're most definitely going to need to pound the zone and the dare you to hit it pitchers are the ones I expect to win the day.

Yeah, so you're making a series of excellent points.

I'll try and unpack them one at a time.

The batting average is not something that I expect to improve because we know that that stat doesn't matter, which is to say if we rewarded people that had a high batting average, people would chase hitting for a high average.

We know that we don't, and thus they don't.

I'm not the least bit concerned about the fact that the league is hitting for its lowest average since the year of the pitcher.

The batting average on balls in play is a much more interesting concept for us to follow here because I view that primarily as a defense intelligence stat.

I have talked to enough people that know, say, to say that the modeling for infield and outfield positioning right now is way ahead of where I even thought it was and what we know in the public sphere, which is to say...

you don't necessarily need to have a bunch of good defenders to have a great defense in Major League Baseball.

If you think about your team's defense like you might in, say, the NFL,

where you don't necessarily need to have a pro bowler on every level to perform at a high level if indeed everyone is doing their job adeptly.