There is a very good reason that BABIP is almost always higher at Fenway than at other parks. It is that last part of the acronym "in play". See at Fenway there a number of balls "in play" that aren't really "in play". More so than any other stadium: some stadiums don't have any balls "in play" that aren't at least theoretically "in play", But until they let left fielders wear jet packs there will always be a bunch of balls "in play" at Fenway that were never actually "in play"
For Roman Anthony, it's an interesting exercise. In the first century of professional baseball, there were no seasons of .300 BA and 150+ K's, not because .300 seasons were especially rare, but because 150 Ks was unheard of. Then Dick Allen did it in 1965. Then Bobby Bonds in 1970. Then Luzinski in 1975. Then Andres Galaragga in 1988. So 4 times in the next 30 years.
But starting in 1995 there were a bunch, as power became cheap in the Steroid Era and the stigma of whiffing so much started to go away with the advent of advanced analytics. From 1995-2016 it happened 16 times, but after that, .300 hitters became exceedingly scarce. Now it's only happened 7 times in the past decade and three of those are Aaron Judge, who is clearly a different animal.
The other 4 were:
Yoan Moncada in 2019: The ball was clearly juiced that year, and Moancada took full advantage, with an insane .402 BABiP. Amazingly, his 154 Ks that year were a HUGE improvement from his 2018 season, in which he led the AL with 217 Ks and hit just .235. He's hit .239 since, never even close to .300. So I think it's safe to say that was a fluke.
Austin Riley did it in 2021, barely hitting .300 (.303) thanks to a .368 BABiP. He's got a .269 career average and has not hit better than .281 before or since. This year he's hitting .200 with zero homers and will probably stay right about there because I picked him for my fantasy draft.
Marcell Ozuna also just barely cleared .300 in 2024 (.302) thanks to his .359 BABiP, including .449 vs LHP! He did hit .300 once before in a full season, with 144 K's in 2017, when the ball was still juiced, and once in 2020, in ~1/3 of a year.
Ohtani also did it in 2024, and Judge did it in 2022, 2024 and in 2025.
So really, the path is twofold at this point:
1. Have an insane BABiP
B. Be a unicorn.
Anthony may be many things but he is probably not a one-in-a-century talent, so if he doesn't get really lucky one year, it ain't happening.
I know those data points may all look like they're right on the edge, but Jazz Chisolm's challenge really did not look close and I really wished he hadn't burned the team's last challenge on a call that was so obviously a strike:
There were two on with nobody out and the Yankees down by one in the 8th, and it was the first pitch of the at-bat! Why even bother to challenge on the first pitch? You can't work your way out of an 0-1count?? Of course he can! In the end the Yankees won, but not because of Chisolm, who worked the count full and then flied out.
More, no one hits .300 anymore. We had one guy in the N.L. last year? Just barely?
The only qualifying active players with a .300+ average are Luis Arraez (.316) and Jose Altuve (.303). When was the last time zero qualifying active players had a career .300 average? It's never happened in the long history of MLB but I could see it happening in the next five years. And what would be a shame.
I'd much rather watch a .300/.350/.500 hitter than a .270/.370/.500 hitter. Hits are almost always more fun than a walk.
I’d be interested to see how many not-challenged calls were actually incorrect. Yesterday in the Mariners game, a player challenged a strike 3 call on an 1-2 count (with 2 outs and runner on 2nd in the 4th). It was confirmed and fully in the zone. Inning over.
The first batter in the top of the 5th got wrung up on a 3-2 count that looked low. I think he challenges it and walks if the weren’t down to 1 challenge. So the bad first challenge ended up costing them later too.
It may be that Anthony can get there despite his hitting approach due to playing for the Red Sox thanks to 81 games at the 2nd best hit friendly ballpark. He also may tailor his approach to the ballpark which rewards getting a lot of good knocks rather than selectively looking for pitches to crush for homers which is rewarded at Yankee Stadium. He definitely won't finish his career as a 0.300 hitter (Arraez and Altuve are the only two active players with that distinction and they haven't yet finished the reaching-accumulation-milestones-while-lowering-rate-based-stats part of their careers yet). If you mean being a 0.300 hitter at his peak the way Trout was, then I'd say no - that's a very high bar. If you mean having a 0.300 season, maybe, but to that I say so what!?! to having a 0.300 season to your credit.
It's not how many pitches are thrown. Many don't require a ball/strike call as the batter swings. Others are easy to call, either right down the middle or well out of the zone. It is those that are close.
And even there, the challenges aren't the full set of possible errors. As teams have limited challenges, they are being selective at ones to dispute. Down five runs, two outs and a 0-2 pitch on the black called a ball? Save the challenge even if the ump is wrong. Many other examples.
So you need to take out the swings. Then take out the ones even Eric Gregg would get right. Then take out those that for strategic reasons won't be challenged. There is your denominator to determine umpire accuracy, a much, much smaller number than the ~300 or so pitches in a game.
I’m not sure anything in that article refuted anything dlf wrote above. The idea of a buffer zone makes no sense. The article you posted mentions accuracy to .39” by ABS. If we asked an umpire to locate every ball, could they do so to the same level of accuracy? No, and it’s not their fault. Umpiring is nigh impossible given the speed and movement of pitches. So, why should we give primacy to the less accurate, subjective judge over the more accurate, objective judge. Even if umpires are wrong on some calls by a very little bit, there’s no reason their opinion should trump ABS.
The umpires are very good. But what ABS shows is that they're not as good as ABS. Just like the human eye is very good at looking at stars, but not as good as the Hubble Telescope. Human hands are very good, but not as good as a hammer or a wrench for pounding a nail or tightening a bolt. The ABS technology is available, so they are using it to make the balls and strikes calls more accurate.
I'm having trouble understanding what point of Joe's or of the post above you're objecting to. The umps are very accurate, and ABS has an uncertainty level - granted. That doesn't mean that ABS isn't more accurate than the umps, or that anybody here is saying anything negative about them.
I could have made clearer what irked me. Here goes:
"I’m coming around more and more to the idea that what we’re really learning here is that baseball pitchers, yeah, they’re REALLY good. They put the ball on the black time after time after time, which doesn’t just challenge hitters, it also challenges umpires."
It DOES challenge umpires. Except for two things.
First, umpires are really good. They are accurate almost all the time.
Second, an old story. There was a minor league umpire who never cared if you cussed him. But one day in the 9th inning, a manager yelled out, "Bear down!" The umpire went crazy. And after the game,he said to another umpire, "I busted my --- for eight innings, and he tells me to bear down?" They are ALWAYS challenged.
Challenge deets should now be part of the box score/stat-line for evert player. Like the Rolaids Relief Man of the year, there should be a sponsored, end-of-season award.
Roman Anthony. Wasn't he a Days of Lives character that kept returning from the dead?
Kathleen's corner re-boot is a hit. I never appreciated the first go-round. She's bulked it up and I'm now a fan. Per today's links, I'm strongly considering buying a Fisher Cats hat.
Re Kathleen's corner: The Angels - Braves brawl wasn't much. Some wild swings thrown by Soler and ineffective jabs by Lopez while still wearing his glove, but nothing really landed from either. Then everyone grabbed everyone else. There is a funny picture going around with Walt Weiss dropping his head and running into Soler's midsection trying to separate him from the scrum. Soler is a massive guy with muscles on his eyelashes. Weiss is rather less so and is on the far side of 60.
As a Braves fan ... Lopez absolutely was throwing at Soler. An earlier homer then a HBP then one that was very up and pretty in ... yeah, I can see why the latter is annoyed.
And of course Soler is responsible for one of the most joyous events in recent Braves history. His homer in Houston in the final game of the 2021 World Series hasn't as far as I can tell landed yet. The Artemis II astronauts may see it soon.
I was wondering if I might see you at the Springsteen show last night. I didn’t, but my daughter did give Bruce a bracelet during Out in the Street, which he then wore for the rest of the show, which almost made up for not having a Posnanski encounter 😉
Roman Anthony, per 162 games in his brief MLB career, is right at 198 Ks. Wow!
I think of Freddie Freeman as a high average hitter with plenty of Ks. He was over .300 when he had 171 in '16. And is basically a .300 hitter for his career (just a smidge under after his slow start this season) while regularly K-ing 130 times a season. But of course my "plenty of Ks" is based on a childhood when Reggie Jackson's usual 150 would be a league leading figure. Freeman's number is in a *very* different era.
My biggest takeaway is how few successful challenges there have been: about one per team per game (351 in 334 team-games). Obviously not every bad call gets challenged, but if we accept that egregious ones tend to get challenged even early/low leverage, what it looks like to me is that there are/were a lot fewer bad ball/strike calls than the average fan believes.
Which isn't really news if you've been following Umpire Scorecard the last few years, but interesting confirmation.
I've been surprised at how bad the hitters are at challenging calls. Granted, I get to see the K zone right there on the screen, but I've watched MANY bad calls go unchallenged and seen lots of hitters challenge calls that weren't even close to being a ball. I can only guess that maybe hitters are challenging pitches that fool them?
A key would be "on average". Game to game doesn't work that way. There are umpires that are so good we don't see the need for replaying or automating, or at least most of the time. But everyone has bad days and some umpires are not nearly as good. There are games where there is a bias causing a difference in ≥ 1.5 run expectancy which has a real influence on games. The game between the Twins and Royals with 11 challenges and 20 overall missed calls is an example. Is it worth it? It's a matter of opinion, but I think when the technology is available and after an adjustment period, it has minimal negative impact other than breaking tradition, then I'm for it (lines calling in tennis, pitch/batters box clock in MLB, etc.).
If officials are going to spend 5 minutes trying to determine who's finger the basketball last touched or super slo-mo freeze frame to see if a runner's foot bounced up off the bag by a mm with a tag applied, then we're hurting the game not improving it. The automating of the strike zone has potential to be the former, but due to the catcher having a much better vantage point and so being better at challenges, we'll be going to a fully automated zone soon and if the resulting strike zone is more difficult for hitters, there may end up being an adjustment there as well.
ESPN has a page dedicated to ABS stats and you can see how well each team is doing and how each umpire is doing. Doesn’t break down counts or innings though
What a great line about the perfect pitch, "It’s “only” 93 mph, but it’s moving like the Jeffersons, and it looks too high and too far inside to hit." Moving like The Jeffersons. I will be thinking about the deluxe apartment in the sky!
There is a very good reason that BABIP is almost always higher at Fenway than at other parks. It is that last part of the acronym "in play". See at Fenway there a number of balls "in play" that aren't really "in play". More so than any other stadium: some stadiums don't have any balls "in play" that aren't at least theoretically "in play", But until they let left fielders wear jet packs there will always be a bunch of balls "in play" at Fenway that were never actually "in play"
For Roman Anthony, it's an interesting exercise. In the first century of professional baseball, there were no seasons of .300 BA and 150+ K's, not because .300 seasons were especially rare, but because 150 Ks was unheard of. Then Dick Allen did it in 1965. Then Bobby Bonds in 1970. Then Luzinski in 1975. Then Andres Galaragga in 1988. So 4 times in the next 30 years.
But starting in 1995 there were a bunch, as power became cheap in the Steroid Era and the stigma of whiffing so much started to go away with the advent of advanced analytics. From 1995-2016 it happened 16 times, but after that, .300 hitters became exceedingly scarce. Now it's only happened 7 times in the past decade and three of those are Aaron Judge, who is clearly a different animal.
The other 4 were:
Yoan Moncada in 2019: The ball was clearly juiced that year, and Moancada took full advantage, with an insane .402 BABiP. Amazingly, his 154 Ks that year were a HUGE improvement from his 2018 season, in which he led the AL with 217 Ks and hit just .235. He's hit .239 since, never even close to .300. So I think it's safe to say that was a fluke.
Austin Riley did it in 2021, barely hitting .300 (.303) thanks to a .368 BABiP. He's got a .269 career average and has not hit better than .281 before or since. This year he's hitting .200 with zero homers and will probably stay right about there because I picked him for my fantasy draft.
Marcell Ozuna also just barely cleared .300 in 2024 (.302) thanks to his .359 BABiP, including .449 vs LHP! He did hit .300 once before in a full season, with 144 K's in 2017, when the ball was still juiced, and once in 2020, in ~1/3 of a year.
Ohtani also did it in 2024, and Judge did it in 2022, 2024 and in 2025.
So really, the path is twofold at this point:
1. Have an insane BABiP
B. Be a unicorn.
Anthony may be many things but he is probably not a one-in-a-century talent, so if he doesn't get really lucky one year, it ain't happening.
I know those data points may all look like they're right on the edge, but Jazz Chisolm's challenge really did not look close and I really wished he hadn't burned the team's last challenge on a call that was so obviously a strike:
https://www.mlb.com/video/mark-leiter-jr-called-strike-to-jazz-chisholm-jr-capture-review?partnerId=web_video-playback-page_video-share
There were two on with nobody out and the Yankees down by one in the 8th, and it was the first pitch of the at-bat! Why even bother to challenge on the first pitch? You can't work your way out of an 0-1count?? Of course he can! In the end the Yankees won, but not because of Chisolm, who worked the count full and then flied out.
More, no one hits .300 anymore. We had one guy in the N.L. last year? Just barely?
The only qualifying active players with a .300+ average are Luis Arraez (.316) and Jose Altuve (.303). When was the last time zero qualifying active players had a career .300 average? It's never happened in the long history of MLB but I could see it happening in the next five years. And what would be a shame.
I'd much rather watch a .300/.350/.500 hitter than a .270/.370/.500 hitter. Hits are almost always more fun than a walk.
That Fisher Cats inning reminded me of the time the White Sox scored 11 runs while only getting one single....
https://baseballroundtable.com/eleven-runs-on-one-hit-revisiting-a-most-peculiar-inning/
And that's with the pitcher batting!
I’d be interested to see how many not-challenged calls were actually incorrect. Yesterday in the Mariners game, a player challenged a strike 3 call on an 1-2 count (with 2 outs and runner on 2nd in the 4th). It was confirmed and fully in the zone. Inning over.
The first batter in the top of the 5th got wrung up on a 3-2 count that looked low. I think he challenges it and walks if the weren’t down to 1 challenge. So the bad first challenge ended up costing them later too.
It may be that Anthony can get there despite his hitting approach due to playing for the Red Sox thanks to 81 games at the 2nd best hit friendly ballpark. He also may tailor his approach to the ballpark which rewards getting a lot of good knocks rather than selectively looking for pitches to crush for homers which is rewarded at Yankee Stadium. He definitely won't finish his career as a 0.300 hitter (Arraez and Altuve are the only two active players with that distinction and they haven't yet finished the reaching-accumulation-milestones-while-lowering-rate-based-stats part of their careers yet). If you mean being a 0.300 hitter at his peak the way Trout was, then I'd say no - that's a very high bar. If you mean having a 0.300 season, maybe, but to that I say so what!?! to having a 0.300 season to your credit.
Joe, I love you, but you're succumbing to something that umpires have talked about forever.
Question: How many pitches were thrown the day of those challenges? So what was the percentage of those calls that were overturned?
This system actually shows us how good the umpires are. Think about it.
It's not how many pitches are thrown. Many don't require a ball/strike call as the batter swings. Others are easy to call, either right down the middle or well out of the zone. It is those that are close.
And even there, the challenges aren't the full set of possible errors. As teams have limited challenges, they are being selective at ones to dispute. Down five runs, two outs and a 0-2 pitch on the black called a ball? Save the challenge even if the ump is wrong. Many other examples.
So you need to take out the swings. Then take out the ones even Eric Gregg would get right. Then take out those that for strategic reasons won't be challenged. There is your denominator to determine umpire accuracy, a much, much smaller number than the ~300 or so pitches in a game.
Read and learn: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7179880/2026/04/08/abs-umpires-standards-fans/
Posting a link instead of engaging in the discussion you started is lazy and annoying.
If you read the article, paraphrase the parts that you believe help your position, don’t give us a reading assignment.
Thank you for your fine work in your role as moderator of this site.
You’re welcome! It’s a lot harder to correct annoying behavior when you aren’t aware of it.
Thanks for a good laugh.
I’m not sure anything in that article refuted anything dlf wrote above. The idea of a buffer zone makes no sense. The article you posted mentions accuracy to .39” by ABS. If we asked an umpire to locate every ball, could they do so to the same level of accuracy? No, and it’s not their fault. Umpiring is nigh impossible given the speed and movement of pitches. So, why should we give primacy to the less accurate, subjective judge over the more accurate, objective judge. Even if umpires are wrong on some calls by a very little bit, there’s no reason their opinion should trump ABS.
The umpires are very good. But what ABS shows is that they're not as good as ABS. Just like the human eye is very good at looking at stars, but not as good as the Hubble Telescope. Human hands are very good, but not as good as a hammer or a wrench for pounding a nail or tightening a bolt. The ABS technology is available, so they are using it to make the balls and strikes calls more accurate.
Or not. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7179880/2026/04/08/abs-umpires-standards-fans/
I'm having trouble understanding what point of Joe's or of the post above you're objecting to. The umps are very accurate, and ABS has an uncertainty level - granted. That doesn't mean that ABS isn't more accurate than the umps, or that anybody here is saying anything negative about them.
I could have made clearer what irked me. Here goes:
"I’m coming around more and more to the idea that what we’re really learning here is that baseball pitchers, yeah, they’re REALLY good. They put the ball on the black time after time after time, which doesn’t just challenge hitters, it also challenges umpires."
It DOES challenge umpires. Except for two things.
First, umpires are really good. They are accurate almost all the time.
Second, an old story. There was a minor league umpire who never cared if you cussed him. But one day in the 9th inning, a manager yelled out, "Bear down!" The umpire went crazy. And after the game,he said to another umpire, "I busted my --- for eight innings, and he tells me to bear down?" They are ALWAYS challenged.
Challenge deets should now be part of the box score/stat-line for evert player. Like the Rolaids Relief Man of the year, there should be a sponsored, end-of-season award.
Roman Anthony. Wasn't he a Days of Lives character that kept returning from the dead?
Kathleen's corner re-boot is a hit. I never appreciated the first go-round. She's bulked it up and I'm now a fan. Per today's links, I'm strongly considering buying a Fisher Cats hat.
Re Kathleen's corner: The Angels - Braves brawl wasn't much. Some wild swings thrown by Soler and ineffective jabs by Lopez while still wearing his glove, but nothing really landed from either. Then everyone grabbed everyone else. There is a funny picture going around with Walt Weiss dropping his head and running into Soler's midsection trying to separate him from the scrum. Soler is a massive guy with muscles on his eyelashes. Weiss is rather less so and is on the far side of 60.
As a Braves fan ... Lopez absolutely was throwing at Soler. An earlier homer then a HBP then one that was very up and pretty in ... yeah, I can see why the latter is annoyed.
And of course Soler is responsible for one of the most joyous events in recent Braves history. His homer in Houston in the final game of the 2021 World Series hasn't as far as I can tell landed yet. The Artemis II astronauts may see it soon.
I was wondering if I might see you at the Springsteen show last night. I didn’t, but my daughter did give Bruce a bracelet during Out in the Street, which he then wore for the rest of the show, which almost made up for not having a Posnanski encounter 😉
I was at the Springsteen show last night at the Forum. 76 years old and the Boss has still got it!
Roman Anthony, per 162 games in his brief MLB career, is right at 198 Ks. Wow!
I think of Freddie Freeman as a high average hitter with plenty of Ks. He was over .300 when he had 171 in '16. And is basically a .300 hitter for his career (just a smidge under after his slow start this season) while regularly K-ing 130 times a season. But of course my "plenty of Ks" is based on a childhood when Reggie Jackson's usual 150 would be a league leading figure. Freeman's number is in a *very* different era.
My biggest takeaway is how few successful challenges there have been: about one per team per game (351 in 334 team-games). Obviously not every bad call gets challenged, but if we accept that egregious ones tend to get challenged even early/low leverage, what it looks like to me is that there are/were a lot fewer bad ball/strike calls than the average fan believes.
Which isn't really news if you've been following Umpire Scorecard the last few years, but interesting confirmation.
I've been surprised at how bad the hitters are at challenging calls. Granted, I get to see the K zone right there on the screen, but I've watched MANY bad calls go unchallenged and seen lots of hitters challenge calls that weren't even close to being a ball. I can only guess that maybe hitters are challenging pitches that fool them?
A key would be "on average". Game to game doesn't work that way. There are umpires that are so good we don't see the need for replaying or automating, or at least most of the time. But everyone has bad days and some umpires are not nearly as good. There are games where there is a bias causing a difference in ≥ 1.5 run expectancy which has a real influence on games. The game between the Twins and Royals with 11 challenges and 20 overall missed calls is an example. Is it worth it? It's a matter of opinion, but I think when the technology is available and after an adjustment period, it has minimal negative impact other than breaking tradition, then I'm for it (lines calling in tennis, pitch/batters box clock in MLB, etc.).
If officials are going to spend 5 minutes trying to determine who's finger the basketball last touched or super slo-mo freeze frame to see if a runner's foot bounced up off the bag by a mm with a tag applied, then we're hurting the game not improving it. The automating of the strike zone has potential to be the former, but due to the catcher having a much better vantage point and so being better at challenges, we'll be going to a fully automated zone soon and if the resulting strike zone is more difficult for hitters, there may end up being an adjustment there as well.
I'm hoping we'll soon have enough data on the challenges to see:
Which *teams* are the most / least successful at challenges?
What counts have the most / least challenges?
What innings have the most / least challenges?
ESPN has a page dedicated to ABS stats and you can see how well each team is doing and how each umpire is doing. Doesn’t break down counts or innings though
What a great line about the perfect pitch, "It’s “only” 93 mph, but it’s moving like the Jeffersons, and it looks too high and too far inside to hit." Moving like The Jeffersons. I will be thinking about the deluxe apartment in the sky!