#18 What I think will happen in the next CBA negotiation

Plus, did the strike zone really change?

Hey there, Hannah here. We’re back from Zach’s bachelor party at the Kentucky Derby and if I had to describe the experience in a word it would be: soggy. But if I got four words it would be: Soggy and still fun!

You can hear more about that in our second edition of Fan/Not a Fan, live tonight around 9pm ET. That video will also hit your inboxes Friday morning.

We have our first paywall today and below it, I give you my unvarnished take on how I think the next CBA negotiations will play out. It’s not couched in anonymous sources or careful phrasing. The beauty of this newsletter is I can just give you my semi professional opinion.

But we’re committed to keeping a portion of every newsletter above the paywall, and today Zach’s using that space to dig into the maybe shrinking strike zone.

What to know about the whole strike zone hubbub

by Zach Crizer

You may have heard that the strike zone is tighter this year, and that it’s sort of controversial. Here’s a Cliff Notes version, with deeper reading in the links.

• The zone is tighter, in both the spatial sense and the precision sense.

• We know this because The Athletic reported that MLB tweaked how umpires are evaluated this winter. The buffer in their ball-strike grades, a zone in which umpires are not dinged for inaccurate calls, changed. Much of that story was dedicated to the question of whether this was communicated: Players and managers said they didn’t know; MLB says it was relayed to front offices. Let’s yada yada that for now …

• Umpires have steadily been getting better at calling balls and strikes correctly, perhaps plateauing for the first time in 2024, per excellent work from Davy Andrews at FanGraphs. This winter’s change incentivized further improvement by shrinking the buffer from 2 inches to 1.5 inches, and the umpires — gasp! — have indeed gotten more accurate.

• The tightening has not been uniform. The top of the zone — again, per Andrews — is logically the most difficult judgment call for umpires, so stricter performance tracking has meant better performance on the bottom and the sides, and slightly less accuracy gauging the top of the strike zone.

• A correction to The Athletic’s story, and to the above graphic, is actually very important in explaining what’s happening. Originally, reporting indicated the buffer went from 2 inches around the zone to 0.75 inches around the zone. In actuality, the width of the buffer is now 1.5 inches, but it also changed position. Instead of being layered on the outside edges of the zone — think icing on a cake — it now brackets the edges evenly, like road lanes around the yellow lines.

• Let that visual sink in and you realize the gist of why pitchers and catchers are the ones kvetching: The placement of the buffer used to give pitchers the umpires’ margin for error. Now it endeavors to treat pitchers and hitters fairly. That seems like a logically sound adjustment, especially for a league that could still use more runners on the bases, though I’ll acknowledge that more rulebook strikes have perpetually been called balls than vice-versa.

• This stands to make things more difficult for framing-focused catchers. As Trevor May pointed out on Foul Territory, “a lot of their livelihood has to do with receiving metrics” that come down to turning borderline pitches into strikes.

• Ultimately, it figures to make the strike zone more well-calibrated on at least three sides, even without technological assistance. In the process, it might also prove once and for all that there’s no such thing as a universally agreed upon Good Idea in a competitive industry.