The strike zone is one of baseball’s most enduring and endearing anachronisms, a throwback to bygone days that has remained untouched by the prying eyes of hi-def video cameras. That doesn’t mean the zone, or its interpretation by decidedly fallible practitioners of the umpirical arts, is beyond either reproach or refinement. Quite the contrary, as we’ve seen what constitutes balls and strikes altered by both edict and entropy.
We could dicker over the semantics of how and why the zone has changed over time, but the fact is that it has indeed changed. And not for the better, at least when it comes to offense.