Babe Ruth and Ted Williams are the two greatest hitters of all time. Williams wrote a book on hitting, which included a rectangle filled with baseballs containing Ted's batting average (BA) guess for himself for each ball. Ted's lowest was the low outside corner: .230. His real career BA was .344 overall. But all of those balls were inside the rectangle. The SZ includes additional balls that border the entire outside of that rectangle. We can only assume that Ted would give himself a lower BA guess for a ball that touched the elusive low outside corner.
And this deals only with the flat rectangular SZ image and completely ignores its depth. It's an imaginary three dimensional area hovering above but not touching home plate. Nothing touches the SZ. That makes it imaginary.
No wonder the plate umpire is being humiliated in 2026 with so many successful challenges of the ump's calls of balls and strikes. The purpose of the SZ is to force the pitcher to throw the ball where the batter can hit it.
In the other two team sports in the USA, there is no equivalent of the SZ. They would be no basket in basketball and no goal post in football. The officials simply decide whether a shot or kick would go through the real thing.
But baseball has no real thing. And baseball fans accept that. Why? Because it's been that way for so long.
The solution is a physical target. Hit it and it's a strike. It almost doesn't matter what the target is: bull's eye, horizontal barrel, ... Something round with no corners, about 20 inches in diameter. Let batters place it between their knees and shoulders directly behind home plate.
What about the catcher & plate umpire? Move them out of harm's way and eliminate concussions from foul balls: behind a protective screen behind the SZ target or behind the pitcher. In either case, extend foul territory half the distance (45 feet) to first and third base and curved. Who likes dribblers deciding an at bat?
This radical change could be delayed with these simple improvements:
1. Eliminate the corners.
2. Require the ENTIRE ball be in the SZ.
3. Define the top and bottom as something understandable:
ball completely above the top of the knee, not barely touching the bottom
ball below the batter's shoulders.
Here's some junk that is not the actual rule:
For fun ask people to touch the top of their SZ. To do so they would need to know the rule. Then guess.
Why does the SZ vary? Each batter gets a personal SZ, probably altered even more when the batter has two strikes: maybe he crouches just a little more.
Presumably that's because batters are different sizes. But it only varies vertically, not horizontally, where it is defined as the width of home plate: 17 inches plus the diameter of the ball (about 2.9 inches) on each side. So almost 23 inches. Why doesn't SZ height vary also? What the heck kind of cockamamie sense does that make?
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