The edge in Year One of ABS goes to the pitchers. Entering Sunday, major league hitters were hitting .235 in May, the third-worst May ever, edging only 1968 and 1908. Despite the usual speculation (or hope), the cold weather in March/April, when hitters batted .243, did not lead to a warmup of offense. Batting average for the season is down four points from the same date last year, from .244 to .240.
The introduction of the ABS challenge system is only incidental compared to the effect of the Pitch Shaping Revolution, which I’ve covered here often. More pitchers are using more pitch types with more movement to more areas of the plate than hitters have ever seen. The hitters simply have too much to cover.
Detroit Tigers infielder Zach McKinstry recently presented an interesting theory regarding the difficulty of preparing for so many different pitches. He explained that road teams are disadvantaged because they don’t have access to the Trajekt high-tech pitching machines that exactly reproduce (including video) the spin and shape from that night’s opposing starter and relievers. (The expensive machines are not portable.) Moreover, the home team typically has more cages than the road team, which allow more prep time.
“I think what he's saying is the preparation's a little bit different on the road compared to home, because you literally can see the pitcher all day if you want,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch says. “And so, I don't know if that leads to performance difference, but it's a routine difference. That’s something that's subtle.
“There are plenty of people that hit well on the road that don't hit at home, and teams and things like that. But I think illustrating your point, it is definitely different. Now, it's grown over the years with the hitting labs and the Trajekts and the machines, pitch shaping, all that stuff is. It is much more in-depth at home than it can be on the road. To the point is, I wonder one day if they don't mandate everybody have a Trajekt on visiting side.”
Says Yankees manager Aaron Boone, “So I would say that's a way away from having them on the road.”
Asked if hitting preparation for the Yankees is different at home than on the road, Boone says, “Yeah. I mean, I'd be curious to see [if] the numbers are backing that up. I don't know if I see the massive advantage yet.”
The numbers back up Boone’s instinct. The delta this year between hitting at home (.241) and road (.238) is only +3. Last year it was +6 and the year before that +2.
To find where the Pitch Shaping Revolution is having its greatest impact you must look toward what it’s doing to older players. The game changed on them fast. Where once they could prep to see a sinker-slider pitcher or a fastball-curveball pitcher or a high-vert four-seam guy, now they must prep for pitchers who defy easy classification. Like Paul Skenes and Zack Wheeler, most pitchers make the ball move in four directions in all quadrants and still have elite velocity.
This is a telling breakdown of how challenging it has become for older hitters to adapt to this fast-changing world.
2026 Batting Average by Age
| Age | Average |
|---|---|
| 25 and under | .243 |
| 26 to 30 | .242 |
| 31 to 35 | .233* |
| 36 and older | .229 |
*Lowest ever, displacing 1917
That’s a kind of actuarial table almost never seen — direct correlation between age and performance. Go back five years and there was almost no separation among those age groups. Go back 10 years and it was flipped — those 31-35 guys were out-hitting everyone else.
Struggling veterans such as Cedric Mullins, 31, Corey Seager, 32, Trevor Story, 33, Adolis Garcia, 33, Manny Machado, 33, Matt Chapman, 33, Trea Turner, 33, and Marcus Semien, 35, are having a hard time with a head-snapping change to how things are done — not unlike older umpires suddenly working under ABS.
And those 36 and older guys? Their jobs are disappearing at an alarming rate. Last year, they took their fewest plate appearances in a full season since 1969, when there were six fewer teams and 484 fewer games. In just 10 years, from 2015 to 2025, their playing time dropped 57%, or from 4.8% of all plate appearances to 2.1%.
Deconstructing Detroit
Let’s use Hinch’s Tigers as an example of the confluence of ABS and Pitch Shaping.
Detroit has dropped from 11th last year in runs per game to 27th this year. Yes, injuries have hurt them immensely. But Hinch made this big picture observation about the decline of hitting before Detroit played a home series against Cleveland last week: “There's a little difference in the fastball usage. There's a little difference in, for whatever reason, the ball's not carrying as much early in the season. And the underneath ball-in-the-air program that everybody's on can stifle offense a little bit.”
His instincts are right. The use of fastballs (not including cutters) is down to another record low, 46.9%.
“We could look this up,” he continues. “We're getting beat by fastballs more. And I don't know if that's just because we're training so many shapes and so many offspeed that its actually backed up our ability to handle a fastball. We're going to find out this series because these guys can beat you with fastballs.”
The Tigers are hitting .250 against fastballs, 21st in MLB. That series against the Guardians? They hit .176 against fastballs.
“It’s a little bit of a small sample to draw too many conclusions,” Hinch says, “But in general, whether it's the pitch calling, the pitch shaping ... the ABS has helped a little bit. Not a lot. A bit. But they're still not throwing to the middle part of the zone. I think there was this thought that ABS was going to drive the strikes into the middle part of the plate. That's not true.”
Pitches in the middle of the plate this year have taken their biggest one-year drop in the 19 seasons of the Pitch Tracking Era. At this rate, that means almost 5,000 cookies are being taken out of the game overnight.
And if you’re talking fastballs down the middle? Forget it. They have hit a Pitch Tracking Era low. In 10 years — about the time those 31–35-year-old guys broke into the game — 4,300 middle-middle fastballs have gone missing, down 13%.
Are you wondering why your team or your favorite veteran hitter aren’t hitting? The answer is that the game increasingly is being decided on the margins of the strike zone with variable pitch shapes. And the pitchers are winning.
Angel in the Outfield
Let’s look for a rare profile for a major league hitter by distilling through layers of qualifications:
1. ... MLB Switch hitters: 54
2. ... Who weigh 200 or more pounds: 34
3. ... Who have hit eight or more home runs: 3
4. ... And who has nine or more stolen bases: 2
Can you guess those two rarities? Elly De Le Cruz of the Reds may be the obvious one. The other is much less obvious: Guardians outfielder Angel Martinez, who entered this season at age 24 with a woeful career slash line of .226/.277/.353 but has been a breakout contributor for a suddenly robust Cleveland offense. With the help of young hitters such as Martinez, Travis Bazzana, 23, Chase DeLauter, 24 and Bryan Rocchia, 25 — all at 120 OPS+ or better — the Guardians have improved from 28th in runs per game last year to 15th.
Says manager Steven Vogt of Martinez, “There are not many engines out there like that that can move the way he does and run, be a switch hitter who can play the outfield and still play second base.”
Martinez is a pull hitter who chases too much, a profile that can lead to streakiness. But he’s an energetic player with good bat-to-ball skills and a good arm. His switch-hitting skills lengthen the lineup, as well as giving Vogt a leadoff option in place of Steven Kwan, who has been slumping for a year (.238 in the past calendar year). You can see the growth in Martinez’s game and confidence almost daily. Only Ben Rice of the Yankees is a more improved hitter in the AL as measured by OPS than Martinez.
“There was a lot of growth in the offseason, particularly swinging lefthanded,” Vogt says. “His first couple of years he was a very good righthanded hitter and he needed a lot of work lefthanded. And he put it to work all winter, had a great spring and really ran it into the season.
“It’s just the maturity to want to keep learning and keep getting better. With Angel, he’s never satisfied. We push him very hard. We are all over him. He’s a special player and we’re going to keep being hard on him.”
The Secret Recipe?
On Thursday night at Yankee Stadium, the Blue Jays threw these five pitchers at the New York Yankees, the highest scoring team in baseball:
• Bryden Fisher, a big leaguer for one calendar year, is making his third MLB start.
• Adam Macko, a Slovakian-born rookie making his third MLB appearance.
• Spencer Miles, a Rule 5 pick who, because of injuries, had thrown 39 1/3 innings since being drafted four years ago.
• Tyler Rogers, who has the lowest release point in baseball.
• Jeff Hoffman, who pitched so poorly at the start of the season that he lost the closer’s role in April.
The result? Only the fifth home game in Yankees history in which they were shut out on three hits or fewer with at least 14 strikeouts. The others:
• 2024 Royals, with seven innings from Seth Lugo.
• 2022 Astros, with Cristian Javier starting a combined no-hitter.
• 2019 Dodgers, with Clayton Kershaw as the first of five pitchers.
• 1914 Nationals at the Polo Grounds behind Jim Shaw.
More important than who shut down the Yankees may be how they did it. The Blue Jays threw a whopping 57.9% breaking pitches, third most in the 750 MLB games this year and the second most against the Yankees in the past seven years. New York went 2-for-23 against all that spin.
In Ben Rice and Aaron Judge, the Yankees have two of the best fastball hitters on the planet. The Blue Jays may have provided the rest of baseball with the recipe for how to pitch to the Yankees. The average team hits 47 points higher against fastballs than breaking pitches. The Yankees’ gap between the pitch types is 55 points.
Yankees by Pitch Types, 2026
| Pitch Type | Percentage | Average | Slugging |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fastball | 53% | .258 | .451 |
| Breaking Pitches | 30.6% | .203 | .393 |
Verducci Breakdown
The Blue Jays have been playing better baseball. But to get back to the postseason, they need more slug from Vlad Guerrero Jr. (.372) and George Springer (.386). The huge bounceback season last year by Springer at age 35 (career-high .309 average and second-best .560 slug) has been followed by a down season marred by a toe injury.
Springer has looked vulnerable to velocity, a rarity for a hitter who hunts fastballs. Through Saturday, he was hitting a career-worst .205 against pitches 95 mph and faster.
The good news for Springer is that he started 3-for-27 against above-average velocity (.111), but in the last week, he was 5-for-12 (.417), including a home run off Paul Skenes, and looks much better. How did he turn it around? Check it out here.
