Is baseball coming apart at the seams?

Major League Baseball has made a few changes to improve the game. A pitch clock has made it faster, bigger bases have made it more exciting. But there’s one change that has had unintended consequences. A serious problem is emerging that may well blow the game apart at both ends — the hitting and the pitching.

My guess is it’s the high strike. The strike zone range is from the batters knees to their arm pits, often called the letters because the letters across the front of the uniform tend to be there. You would hear a broadcaster say, “A strike at the letters, and now the count is 0 and 1, no balls and one strike.”

Before this season, umpires did not uniformly call this pitch a strike. So why are they doing it now? Another guess is the emerging possibility of the use of robo-umps. According to a story in The Athletic, the robo-umps were calling pitches a few inches below the letters. But if the Robo-umps are calling the high strike, the umps, so for self-preservation, may have begun to call them, too.

And the results thus far have been devastating. And yeah, if the pitch at the letters should be a strike, then call it a strike. The problem with that is, pitchers now know it’s being called a strike, so they are aiming a 98 mph beebee, a velocity rarely reached only a few years ago, to that spot in the strike zone and some of these otherwise elite hitters can’t catch up to it. They miss, foul it back or hit it feebly and the result on the body of taking a hard, awkward swing and the impact of the bat hitting the ball could be injuring these batters. There’s been a hard-to-explain spike in the number of oblique injuries.

The high heater being called a strike makes the change-up, curve, slider and sinker, the other types of pitches a batter can face, much harder to hit and certainly harder on which to get a base hit. If left-handed pitcher Chris Sale gets a strike on a 98 mph high inside fastball, good luck connecting on the slider that starts 20 inches off the plate and breaks over the now-unreachable outside corner at the knees.

Baseball is the game of inches. And these inches matter.

The main damage is being seen in the batting averages and power numbers of many top-tier players. The Diamondbacks’ Corbin Carroll, last season’s rookie of the year and one of the game’s most dynamic players, is batting .197 with 1 homer and 5 RBI. The past week he’s gotten three hits in 21 at-bats, a .143 clip. Striking out too much? No. His rate is actually down from last season. He used to hit leadoff or second. Now he’s battng 9th and may have to be sent back down to the minors. He could be going from one of the game’s great stars to playing himself out of the game and the D-Backs signed this kid to an 8-year $111 million contract — guaranteed.

Atlanta’s Ronald Acuna Jr. is nowhere close to his MVP pace from last season.

New York Yankees superstar Aaron Judge is batting .200 with 39 strikeouts to 24 hits. Atlanta’s Matt Olson (.283, 54 home runs, 139 RBIs) is at .206, 3 and 16 and Austin Riley (.287, 37, 97) is at .234, 2 and 16. Philadelphia’s Bryce Harper is at .233 with more Ks than hits. That’s not normal.

The Mets’ Francisco Lindor is at .195 yet his strikeout rate is down, too, as is teammate and slugger Pete Alonso, who is at .228. San Diego’s flamboyant Fernando Tatis is at .233 and was batting .115 for the week.

Corey Seager and Evan Carter of the World Series Champion Texas Rangers are sitting in the .220s. Houston’s Alex Bregman is at .208 and teammate and longtime veteran Jose Abreu, who had 91 RBI last season, was sent to the minors. He was batting .099.

Toronto’s top of the order, George Springer, Vladimir Guerrero and Bo Bichette, all big stars, are at .212, .231 and .205. Tampa Bay’s Yandy Diaz hit .330 last year with 23 homers. He’s batting .220 and has one dinger. Teammate Randy Arozorena, one of the game’s most daring players, is at a shocking .139 with 39 strikeouts with no sign of turning it around. And there are plenty more. St. Louis’ Paul Goldschmidt, MVP a few years ago, is finally showing signs of snapping out of it; still his production is way down from his usual.

But you get the picture. These $20 million to $35 million a year players cannot be languishing at hitting .220. The owners will not stand for it. And if this continues, nobody will.

Now, let’s look at the pitching.

Baseball is finding out that pitchers are not machines that can be broken and then repaired or replaced, although that seems to be what’s happening. Science, the use of AI to analyze every movement a pitcher makes, is getting the most out of these arms in terms of velocity and spin rate on the ball they throw. These adjustments are made and the repitition of the pitching motion required to achieve these metrics is what’s breaking down these great pitchers. How a pitcher had thrown the ball naturally has hit head on with these pitchers being shown and told to throw the ball mechanically.

Now, the high strike. Pitchers know they are getting the call on pitches that catch the upper most border of the strike zone. Stands to reason they’d then be throwing that pitch a bit more often and that little bit could be the extra strain the arm will not bear.

Atlanta’s Spencer Strider, the most exciting pitcher in the game, went down after only two starts this season, requiring surgery to rebuild his arm. He won 20 games in 2023, a rare feat in this era. He is one of an alarming number of top-tier pitchers who are out of the game this season, on top of a spate of stars who are sitting out all or much of this season because of injuries they incurred last season. It remains to be seen if Yankees star Gerrit Cole will pitch again this summer. Baltimore’s bright star, Grayson Rodiguez, went down this week.

Texas’ Jacob DeGrom, Miami’s Sandy Alcantara, San Francisco’s Robbie Ray, and the Dodgers’ Walker Buehler were among about 15 pitchers, great pitchers, to go down last season and are trying to make it back this year — and hoping to achieve the same high rate of effectiveness.

This two-edge sword is hard to handle. Pitchers are getting batters out more effectively, too effective it seems. The more effective they are, the higher it seems is the risk of injury. So many star hitters are found in the tank while the star pitchers are found in the recovery room.

Help!

Is this high strike what’s ailing baseball? No doubt an oversimplification. However, by the time the results are weighed and measured, the damage done could be irreparable in terms of careers. Losing star pitchers and watching star players struggle is not the best recipe for building interest in what’s been forecast by some observers as a game whose future is in trouble. Getting the message quietly out to the umpires to go back to the way things were could be the best way out of this.

Bring back the old strike zone.