Spring training is off to a rough start for Colorado Rockies left fielder Nolan Jones, who does not have a hit through his first four games, but that barely matters. He already claimed perhaps his most cherished victory of the season: He learned he is taller than first baseman Michael Toglia.
“Mike’s told me he’s taller than me for three years straight,” says Jones. “But I was taller than him on the ABS.”
“By four millimeters!” laments Toglia, who is listed at 6’5” but is actually 6’4”.
“Taller,” says Jones, 6’4” plus four millimeters.
Amid the fungoes and photo days has come a new rite of spring: the couple of hours when Major League Baseball descends upon camps to measure hitters for the automated ball-strike challenge system (ABS) in use for approximately 60% of exhibition games this spring. The idea is that the games would proceed as normal, with human umpires, except that teams would get two challenges per game. Only the pitcher, catcher or batter can use a challenge; if the challenge is successful, the team retains it. (The league said fans and players overwhelmingly prefer this system to a fully human one or a fully automated one.)
The league, which debuted the system in the independent Atlantic League in 2019 and has expanded it to the Florida State League and Triple A since, is trying it at the major league level for the first time this year. If it earns rave reviews, it could come to the regular season as early as ’26.
“This is a pretty big decision for the game of baseball,” says MLB executive vice president of baseball operations Morgan Sword, “that we want to get everybody to weigh in on.”
But first there are some logistics to sort through, starting with the dimensions of the automated strike zone. MLB has settled on a strike zone width of 17 inches and height spanning the length between 27% of a batter’s height to 53.5% of a batter’s height (roughly the letters to the knees when he’s in his normal stance). In order to get that height, they have to measure it.
Which is bad news for the players who have been a little generous when submitting their stats to the media guide.
“Some guys are gonna get caught,” says Rockies pitcher Austin Gomber, who because of his position did not need to be measured and because of his 6’5” listed frame did not need to worry. (If a pitcher pinch-hits—or if a player who was not officially measured debuts—the league will just use his listed height.)
Infielder Kyle Farmer is among those about to undergo a disappointing rewriting. Much like a lot of 5’11” guys on dating apps, he’s long listed himself at 6’0”. The ABS measurers disagreed.
“I’m 5’12”!” he insists.
But the measuring team does not accept appeals. A group of independent strength and conditioning coaches, chosen jointly by the league and the union, are visiting each camp to start the spring (the Rockies went first.) They bring in players in shorts, so they can make sure no one is bending his knees to reduce the size of his strike zone, and they have them stand up against a wall in socks or bare feet. They ask them to take a deep breath, which inflates the lungs and forces players to stand up straight, then, just like at the doctor’s office, they bring the measuring device down onto the player’s head and call out the number. They repeat the test and average the results. They also do the whole thing in millimeters, leaving players frantically Googling to learn their fate.
The veterans know that you want to be as short as possible. Third baseman Ryan McMahon, who is listed at 6’2” and did not know his ABS result because he is unfamiliar with the metric system, slumped as much as he could get away with.
“Hopefully that helps,” he says. “No high strikes!”
But most of the time, ego takes over. There were heated discussions of cushioned socks. Some players were disappointed to learn their hair earned them no extra ticks. When it came down to it, almost no one could bring himself to crouch.
“[Outfielder Sam] Hilliard was like, ‘Man, I got on the scale and I couldn’t help it, I wanted to be as tall as I could,’” McMahon relates.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter; the league is sending the results to Southwest Research Institute, which will confirm through biomechanical analysis that no one was cheating. And even the cheaters probably only bought themselves fractions of an inch. But still, for the team, shouldn’t you do everything you can?
Jones considers this. Then he looks at Toglia. “No,” he says. “Honestly, I would’ve stretched out just to be taller than him.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Men Lie About Their Height—Even Baseball Players.
