In the second inning of Game 3 of the World Series, Daulton Varsho took a high Tyler Glasnow 3-1 pitch that he, and pretty much everyone in the stadium, believed was ball four.
It wasn’t.
Undoubtedly, the 3-1 pitch Varsho took as a called strike was above the zone and should have been called a ball. And the delayed strike call on a pitch that everyone believed was a ball likely played a part in Bo Bichette leaving first base, which led to him getting thrown out for one of the weirdest pickoffs we will ever see.
That begs the question: was this just a bad call, or a historically bad call?
Here’s the location of the pitch. The green box represents Varsho’s strike zone based on his height. The pitch just to the left of the orange pitch and slightly lower than the called strike two is a ball that had been called earlier in the at-bat.
Over the past four seasons, there have been 2,327 pitches taken that were located between 3-feet, 8.2 inches and 3-feet, 8.4 inches above the ground over the middle(ish) of the plate (between six inches on either side of the plate’s midpoint). Because Varsho is only 5-foot-8, it was an even more egregious miss with him at the plate than it would be with a hitter with average height.
Using MLB’s new 2026 formula for individualized strike zones, Varsho’s zone tops out at just over 3-feet, 2 inches, so the pitch was a six-inch miss.
The strike zone does vary with height. If the 6-foot-8 Aaron Judge had been at the plate, the pitch would have been within his strike zone.
Of those 2,237 pitches, only 153 (6.6%) were called strikes. So it can’t be said that it never happens, but pitches this high are almost never called strikes.
But it has happened to Varsho before. It happened last month. On a 2-1 pitch against the Reds, Varsho saw this pitch called strike two.
And here’s an interesting quirk. This is the second time that Varsho has seen a pitch in that location called a strike. He’s seen two called strikes in this location among nine pitches he’s taken there over the past four seasons.
Aaron Judge has taken three pitches in that location, and all three have been called balls, even though for him it’s a pitch in his strike zone because of his height.
This will be an interesting aspect of the ABS system next year. Tall hitters often get poor calls at the bottom of the zone and get the benefit of bad calls at the top of the zone, and the inverse is true for shorter hitters. Judge gets taken pitches called strikes in the “shadow zone” at the top of the zone only 5.6% of the time, compared to the league average of 30.1%. But in the shadow zone below the zone, he gets called strikes 41.6% of the time, compared to the league average of 36.2%.
For Varsho, the reverse is true. He’s seen pitches in the top shadow zone called strikes 33.3% of the time, above the league average. At the bottom shadow zone, he also has a 33.3% called strike rate, which is below the league average.
So next year with the ABS system, umpires will have to recalibrate and adjust to hitters heights, which has proven tricky in recent years.
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