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COPYRIGHT 2001 South Florida Sun-Sentinal
Byline: Mike Berardino
Say an old college buddy you haven't seen or talked to for 25 years drops by one weekend. The visit comes totally out of the blue. No special occasion or life-altering event prompted him to seek you out. He just felt like looking you up.
The last time you two were together, Archie Bunker was still cracking on Meathead, Marcus Welby was the nation's most trusted physician and Rocky was still better known as Bullwinkle's sidekick rather than a punchy pug from Philadelphia.
Heck, you both had hair back then. Lots of it. Way too much of it, actually. Now you sit face to face, trying to make small talk, catching up.
How would you feel? Awkward. Confused. Uncertain about the next step. Wondering just how long this old friend plans to hang around.
That's pretty much how baseball people are feeling these days. After a quarter-century disappearance, the rulebook strike zone has dropped by for a visit. And from all indications this spring, it plans to stay awhile.
As baseball opens another season, it does so amid perhaps the most significant overnight change in the way the game is played since the introduction of the designated hitter in 1973. The strike zone, the sport's most basic parameter, has been narrowed horizontally and expanded vertically, like something out of a carnival house of mirrors.
No longer will the top of the strike zone stop at the hitter's belt. Now it will extend another five to 7 { inches (or two to 2 { baseballs) higher to the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the belt, as the rulebook specifies.
The zone should be determined, umpires have been told, "at the moment the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball, the instant before the swing starts," which should drop the top level a few inches from where it would be as the hitter stands upright.
Nor will pitchers be able to expand the strike zone east and west, as the better ones have for years. Strikes still must be no lower than the hollow of the hitter's knee, as the rulebook states, but now they also...
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