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Last night the Cubs knocked the Padres out of the playoffs with a 3-1 win. There were plenty of key moments, but the pitch that Padres fans will likely remember for quite a long time is the 3-2 fastball to Xander Bogaerts with no outs in the ninth.

Bogaerts took the low fastball and started toward first, only to turn and see home plate umpire D.J. Reyburn ring him up for strike three.

The Padres would love to have ABS right now pic.twitter.com/UP807z5ej7

— Talkin†Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) October 3, 2025

On the ESPN broadcast, the strike-zone box showed the pitch below the zone. Many, including myself, noted that next year with the ABS challenge system, this is exactly the type of pitch that would have been challenged.

But would it have been overturned? The answer is a perfect encapsulation of why understanding the strike zone is difficult but important.

On Baseball Savant, here’s what Keller’s called strikes from last night’s game look like. Note the red dot at the very bottom of the strike zone. That’s the Bogaerts pitch.

I can hear the Cubs fans in Chicago from here. See. Here is proof that the pitch was actually a strike, and only a poorly drawn strike zone box on the broadcast misled everyone.

Taking the pitch coordinates from the data and plotting the pitch myself, I get the same result.

This would seem to be clear proof of a strike, but it’s not. It’s an example of something everyone will get more accustomed to next year when the ABS challenge system arrives.

That’s the pitch plot of Keller throwing to a generic strike zone. For a generic strike zone, the box generally sits at 1.5 to 3.5 feet off the ground. Keller’s pitch crossed the plate at 1.492 feet above the ground. That would be the kind of pitch so close to the zone that the edge of the baseball very well would brush the bottom of the box.

But Keller wasn’t throwing to a generic zone. He was throwing to Bogaerts. While the ABS challenge system won’t arrive in the major leagues until 2026, MLB has already calculated what the strike zone will be for each player. The top of the zone is 53.5% of their height and the bottom of the zone is 27.5% of their height.

Bogaerts is taller than average at 6-foot-2 (74 inches). So the top of his zone is 3.62 feet off the ground and the bottom is 1.69 feet off the ground. And if you plot this pitch compared to that actual strike zone, it is clearly a miss well below the zone. The Baseball Savant track of this exact pitch adjusts the zone to reflect that.

Plotting it myself gets the same result.

This was a ball. Umpires are also supposed to adjust their strike zones to reflect a batter’s actual height. The current MLB Rule Book states:

The STRIKE ZONE is that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batterâ€s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.

It will be interesting to see if the rulebook definition gets changed next year when the ABS challenge zone arrives, as the ABS zone does not take into account stance tracking. MLB experimented with doing just that in the minors, but found better results by taking a simple percentage of player height to set the zone.

There’s one other interesting aspect of this play. Watch Carson Kelly’s glove movement as he receives the pitch.

Kelly isn’t the most fluid receiver on low pitches. In fact, he rated below-average on how many borderline pitches at the bottom of the zone he gets called strikes on. But here he did the mechanics that are taught almost universally across pro baseball now. By using a one-knee stance, he can comfortably get low. Then, knowing it’s going to be a low pitch, he takes his mitt and brushes the dirt with it to start his receiving mechanics.

While that may look unconventional, it’s a key part of framing low pitches. Catchers want to be bringing their mitt up into the zone pitch after pitch when receiving pitches at the bottom of the zone. The best way to do that is to start with the mitt well below the zone, and then bring the mitt up into the zone.

When he catches the pitch, he has the mitt largely “in the zone”.

And then almost immediately he brings the entirety of his mitt into the middle of the zone.

This isn’t an attempt to fool the umpire into thinking the pitch was middle-middle. It’s all about making the receiving motion one where the mitt fluidly flows into the zone, pitch after pitch. It’s about smudging the demarcation lines on the edges of the zone.

Kelly didn’t do it all that fluidly on this pitch. But apparently it was enough to help convince the umpire it was a strike.

So to answer the question. If this pitch had been challenged next year, it would have been overturned. Bogaerts would have walked to first base, and the game would have been changed.

But for last night, it was a called strike with no recourse.

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