#bbcor-bats

#bbcor-bats

"I feel like 100 is the new 95," said Los Angeles Dodgers reliever Will Klein, who first hit 100 in a summer ball all-star game in 2020 and expects to again this season, having topped out thus far at 98.8 mph. "It used to be, 'You throw 95, that's gas.' Now, it's 100. And now you see starters out there sitting 100."

Roman Anthony is the embodiment of where the Red Sox are going as a franchise. Fans already adore him, ownership hitched their wagon to the tantalizing upside and gave him an eight year extension.

During Saturday's game between the Red Sox and the Reds, Eugenio Suarez challenged Bucknor on back-to-back strike three calls and successfully had them overturned by the robo ump. It doesn't matter that Suarez ultimately grounded out. What matters is that, in a game where the Reds hit two home runs, the loudest cheers came for a pair of successful ABS challenges.

The idea that the Automated Balls and Strikes challenge system is going to constantly humiliate umpires is, to me, a ridiculous concern. We're talking about hundreds of calls in a game, with upwards of 100 games per week, and 99.9% of the time, ABS doesn't even factor into a pitch at all.

If a team enters extra innings without a challenge, they'll be given an extra one every inning. The challenges will not accumulate if not used. Teams will never have more than one challenge per extra inning unless they entered extra frames with their original two intact. It's possible for both an ABS challenge and video replay challenge to occur on the same play. If that happens, the ball-strike call will be adjudicated first, followed by the video replay on the bases.

To be clear, while this is only a few data points, the r-squared between these two data elements is over 50 percent, i.e., over half the variation in league-average HR/FB alone is explained just by the mean drag coefficient for the year. The chart is also incredibly blatant (one goes up, the other goes down), with the main thing ruining being, in part, 2025 - where the ball's coefficient of restitution changed in addition to its drag coefficient.