The Year in In-Zone Hit-By-Pitches

Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images At least nine times during the 2026 season, a replay review overturned a hit-by-pitch. It may well have happened more often, but I found nine pitches that went down as foul balls because the umpire awarded the batter first base after an apparent hit-by-pitch, only for the defending team to successfully challenge that the ball hit the bat instead. Once every two or three weeks, a batter grabbed his hand and exclaimed, “Ye gods, I’ve been struck!” Only for the catcher to arise and reply, “I’ll prove the contrary, thou subtle, perjured, false, disloyal man! Thy club’s the thing withstood th’ offending sphere.” At which point the Mattress Firm Supermo replay intoned with just the right level of firmness, “Forsooth, this catcher is the messenger of truth.” And the umpire had no choice but to swallow his pride and announce to the fans, “Lo, through the proof of the Mattress Firm Supermo replay I see how I’m hoodwink’d. Behold my fingers three.”You Aren't a FanGraphs MemberIt looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed. We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member. 1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other. 2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off. 3. Dark mode and Classic mode! 4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them. 5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects. 6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.) 7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only. 8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO. 9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members. 10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features! We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it. In case you didn't read all that, here's the short version. Membership includes:✓Ad-free browsing✓Unlimited FanGraphs & RotoGraphs articles✓Historical & platoon projections✓Leaderboard & player-page stat heatmaps✓One-click data exports✓Customizable player-page dashboards✓Dark & Classic site modes✓Weekly Members-only mailbag✓FanGraphs Walk-Off, your year in review✓Optional homepage photo removal✓Gift articles to non-Members✓Full postseason coverage These may not be exact quotes, but you get the point. It’s not particularly rare for a hit-by-pitch to get overturned. However, during the 2026 season, I was hoping that we’d see one particular variety of hit-by-pitch get overturned. It is my favorite kind of hit-by-pitch, which I now realize seems like a weird thing to say. To be clear, I’m not in favor of people getting hit by pitches. However, as long as people are getting hit by pitches, I prefer for it to happen in a way that doesn’t involve injuries but instead involves some element of silliness. For example, this ball that hit Joey Votto in 2022 has a lot going for it. The first is the eloquence with which Votto expressed his feelings about getting hit, so please turn your volume up. The second is the fact that the pitch was in the strike zone. It should have been a strike, and it wouldn’t be the last time Votto earned a free trip to first base on such a pitch. Here he is almost exactly a year later hurling himself into the path of another would-be strike. Votto is by no means alone here. Since the beginning of the pitch tracking era in 2008, we’ve seen 40 hit-by-pitches on pitches that should have been called strikes, and at least one in every season except 2010 and 2011. When it happened in previous years, the defense had no recourse. Even if the fielding team were to challenge the play, the review could only look at whether the ball actually hit the batter, not where it hit him. In 2025, when Ketel Marte decided to send his elbow on a fishing expedition in the strike zone and caught himself a Germán Márquez fastball, Colorado catcher Hunter Goodman had no choice but to hang his head in despair. The bright side of this Young Goodman Frown story is that the ladies in the background look delighted to be receiving their nachos. In 2026, that changed. (The part about catchers not having any recourse, not the nacho part. People will always be delighted to receive nachos.) Or at least I’m pretty sure it changed. With the implementation of the ABS challenge system at the major league level, pitchers and catchers could finally tap their helmets if they believed that the pitch that hit a batter was in the zone. I think. I’ve looked in all the explainers I could find, and I wasn’t able to find any kind of exemption for hit-by-pitches, so I can’t imagine why that wouldn’t be the case. The rules about hit-by-pitches in the strike zone are clear; they’re strikes. In theory, the ABS system should have been the end of the z-HBP. But even that theoretical utopia requires the catcher to challenge the call. So far as I can tell, that never happened once. Instead, we saw four hit-by-pitches on would-be strikes in 2026. That’s tied for the most in any season. Let’s name and shame the offenders, shall we? Here are the would-be strikes that struck Mike Trout, Tyler Heineman, Austin Martin, and Alejandro Osuna. The weird thing is that although none of the catchers thought to challenge the pitches, they really did seem to know that they were strikes. We can say that because they tried their best to frame all four pitches. At the very least, they knew the pitches were close enough that they might get the call. Salvador Perez’s herky-jerky attempt at this task might help explain why he’s put up such poor defensive numbers over the past several years. Once they realized what happened, three of the catchers lodged some form of protest. Heineman’s offense was the most grievous by far. Simeon Woods Richardson froze him with a comeback splitter that should have been strike three. It was the only pitch that was bending back toward the zone, which in theory should have made it an easier call for the umpire. Heineman, perhaps sensing that he was beaten, threw his elbow into the path of the pitch. Minnesota catcher Victor Caratini made his case to home plate umpire Jacob Metz (yeah, we’re naming and shaming everybody) by turning around and pointing to the spot in the strike zone where the ball would have landed. The funny thing is that when this happened a couple months later, also in Minnesota, also when the Twins were in their lake-themed City Connect jerseys, Caratini’s teammate Ryan Jeffers made his case to home plate umpire Chris Guccione the exact same way. The only logical conclusion from these two data points is that the Twins have a firm organizational policy in place for this occurrence. They are prepared for any eventuality, and the field operations manual clearly states that if a batter gets hit by a pitch in the strike zone, you turn around and explain the situation to the umpire, and you helpfully point just to remind the umpire that the strike zone lives a foot or so above home plate and is an elbow-free zone. On August 5, the shoe was on the other elbow. When Minnesota’s own Austin Martin wore a 2-2 Noah Cameron curveball on the corner, Perez seemed less prepared. The Royals clearly never wrote a “Point at the Strike Zone” memo, and it showed. Instead, Perez whipped off his mask, turned toward umpire John Bacon, and, uh, proposed marriage maybe? Catchers will do anything to get a call. I mean, Perez probably said something about the pitch being a strike rather than offering his hand in holy matrimony. But if a catcher were going to propose to an umpire between pitches, don’t you think this is what it would look like? Maybe that’s why one-knee-down catching has taken the league by storm. You never know when it’ll be the right time to pop the question. By far the best reaction came from White Sox catcher Drew Romo. When you’re a rookie with 23 big league games under your belt and the person dipping an appendage into the strike zone is literally Mike Trout, you probably don’t feel secure enough to turn around and make your appeal to home plate umpire Nic Lentz. But you’re still a professional with a job to do, so you still try to mitigate the damage. You look out at your pitcher and you reassure him the best way you know how. For Romo, that means an understated head tilt, as if to say, “Well I thought it was a good pitch.” You may have noticed that three of these pitches should have been strike three. In fact, 24 of the 40 in-zone hit-by-pitches Statcast has recorded came with two strikes. That’s 60%, more than double the percentage of all pitches (29%) that have come with two strikes during the pitch tracking era. I know it’s a small sample, but that’s still way too high to be a coincidence. Batters who get frozen on a pitch on the corner are making a very quick decision to avoid a strikeout by spelunking into the depths of the strike zone. The good news is that catchers finally have a tool for fighting back against this encroachment. They can use their heads. Wait, sorry, I mean they can tap their heads. They just have to remember to do it.