Author: fartheroffthewall

“Unhittable: How Technology, Mavericks and Innovators Engineered Baseball’s New Era of
Pitching Dominance”

The author: Rob Freidman/aka PitchingNinja
The details: HarperCollins, 288 pages, $32, released March 24, ‘26
The links: The publisher, the author, Bookshop.org

A review in 90 feet or less:

Technically, it was an illogical technological clustermess. It nearly short-circuited the ebbs and flow and safety of all concerned in a recent Dodgers-Mets contest.

Fourth inning: Mets reliever Craig Kimbrel does his crab-like glare into catcher Francisco Alvarez for a sign — even though we assume he’s hearing it through a small speaker in his cap with the new-fangled PitchCom device. That was put into the game to speed it up and prevent sign stealing. Now we see some unintended consequences.

As Alvarez realizes the pitch clock is winding down to the final two seconds, has a panic attack. Rather than allow Kimbrel to be flagged as a violator, and the count to the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani to go to 3-2, the catcher leaps out from behind the plate, sidesteps Ohtani (just as he’s coiling to what he anticipates is a ball coming at him), seems to ask for a timeout amidst his arm flailing, lurches toward the mound and plants himself in front of the plate on the grass like a school crossing guard trying to stop an oncoming e-bike.

Kimbrel, head down, doesn’t notice all this happening. So when he leaps into his jerky windup, he suddenly realizes Alvarez is an object in his peripheral vision closer than he actually appears.

And Ohtani freaks out.

Already been hit by a pitch in his first at-bat and still feeling its affect, and already startled by Alvarez moments earlier when the catcher tried to make a back-pick of Dodgers runner Miguel Rojas at first base, Ohtani spins away to his right in some kind of self preservation mode.

Homeplate umpire Nic Lentz does his own ballet leap to his left. Did he agree to Alvarez’s time-out call? We’re not all that sure as Lentz is still trying to keep some integrity of the game.

Kimbrel almost falls down.

The Dodgers’ broadcasters gasp as well. What just happened?

Unbelievable.

Ninth inning: We’re being technologically challenged again with the Dodgers putting the final touches on a 4-0 victory. Gotta use those unused Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System head-taps, because they don’t carry over to extra innings. Or to tomorrow. Use ’em or lose ’em.

Dodgers reliever Tanner Scott pitches to Mets’ No 9 hitter Tyrone Taylor with a 1-1 count. It is called a ball by Lentz. Dodgers catcher Will Smith wants a review.

The ABS graphic shows that a sliver of the ball hit the side of the gray screen box graphic. The call is overturned. It’s a 1-2 count now instead of 2-1.

“That’s ridiculous,” says Dodgers TV analyst Eric Karros. “You gotta give me more than a seam on that part of the plate (to change it from a ball to a strike). I mean … you gotta give me half a ball or something.”

Undeniable.

And all there for the fans left in the expensive seats to capture on their iPhones to share later.

For all of today’s umpires — including C.B. Bucknor — are already flinching on calling runners safe or out on the basepaths, since instant replay continues to add more nuanced layers of challenge-able calls but also refuses others like a foul tip that make it seem rather arbitrary — this technology seems to add to this pursuit of perfection that will never be attained.

“MLB doesn’t really know in what direction they want the game to go,” Joe Posnanski has written about this on an almost daily basis since the 2026 season started, and before. “They know — they HAVE to know — that the Day of the Umpire has passed, and that the game will be officiated very differently in the years ahead. And I have been saying for a while now that ABS for every pitch is coming.”

Unacceptable.

Amidst CNN’s March 25 broadcasting day, there was Phil Mattingly, the network’s chief domestic correspondent filling in for Jake Tapper on “The Lead” (and apparently no relation to Don Mattingly), trying to navigate that hour’s worth of more bizzaro news coverage. He found a way to segue from the Strait of Hormuz straight to Friedman toward the end of the show so Friedman’s new book could be discussed completely out of context before “Erin Burnett Outfront” comes on.

Mattingly: I do want to start with ABS. What do you think of this? What does this change?
Friedman: So, it changes a lot. It’s going to change things like framing. It’s going to change what you’re seeing on the on the screen because some pitches, you know, you see those curve balls that barely clip the zone that umpires give up on, hitters give up on, and now they can be challenged and be a strike. There’s a whole level of strategy that comes to be now with robo umps.
Mattingly: Does this benefit pitchers?
Friedman: That’s a great question. I think that’s heavily debated. … There are hitters that say it favors them because the strike zone will be smaller and they can’t expand the zone. But there are pitchers that say they’re just going to clip the zone with breaking stuff, east to west, north to south. And hitters are going to be helpless against it. So, I’m curious to see what happens.
Mattingly: Yeah, it’s going to be fascinating to watch it play out.

How unseemly. Unsuitable. Unbefitting for all.

And wait’ll next year when the automated check-swing review process is introduced.

“Death in the Strike Zone:
The Mystery of America’s First Baseball Hero”

The author: Thomas W. Gilbert
The details: David R. Godine Publishing, 192 pages, $27.95; released March 24, ’26
The links: The publisher, the author website, Bookshop.org

A review in 90 feet or less

In the summer of 2000, between the junior and senior seasons where he would become UCLA’s starting shortstop, Josh Canales jumped at a chance to go New York and play for the Newark (N.Y.) Raptors of the Northeast Collegiate Baseball League. His second base double-play partner would be Kelsey Osburn, a sophomore at the University of Arizona.

“Our attitudes were similar, our personalities were similar,” Canales would explain. “When we played up the middle we had an awesome chemistry and a lot of fun.”

On July 11, as Canales was taking batting practice and Osburn was running the bases, Canales laced a ball heading foul down the third base line. The ball caught Osburn just above the ear on his right temple. Osburn, who had not been wearing a helmet, was conscious for about three minutes, crumpled to the ground and slipped into a coma. He was airlifted from the field in Newark, N.Y. to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, where doctors performed brain surgery.

He never woke up. Osburn was 20.

“I didn’t know if I ever wanted to pick up a bat again,” said Canales, who grew up in Carson and, at 14, briefly joined an inner-city gang out of rebellious adolescence. He had got himself on a productive path — as a senior at Carson High, Canales hit .380 with 25 stolen bases and 43 runs, and was drafted in the 19th round by Oakland.

The 5-foot-9, 145 pound infielder decided to go to the University of Florida for two seasons, transferred to UCLA, and after hitting .248 in 52 games as a junior, and improved to .376 with 15 stolen bases in 16 chances during in 53 games as a senior leading into the 2001 draft — a 16th-round pick by his hometown Dodgers. After logging a few seasons of Single-A ball (aside from one Triple-A at bat with Las Vegas in 2002), his baseball life was done.

But the death of Osburn lingered.

“It was a defining moment in my life,” said Canales, who played with the initials “K.O.” on his glove during the rest of his college and minor-league career. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t remember Kelsey. I feel like when Kelsey died, a piece of his heart went into me. He was 5-feet-5 and had to fight and scrap for everything he ever got. He had the heart of a lion. …

“This built character very quickly,” Canales said about what he went through. “I grew in my faith and learned to put life in perspective.”

It helped that Canales could turn his parents – Isaac, the pastor of 1,300-member Mission Ebenezer Family Church in Carson, and his mother, Ritha, a nurse. Canales has used his experience with this tragedy as he and his wife are pastors at the same Carson church.

“Kelsey Osburn died doing something he loved,” Canales says to help him keep things in perspective.

To start chapter 2 in his new book, Thomas Gilbert writes: “Nobody is supposed to die from playing baseball. Especially not amateur baseball — and certainly not a meaningless game with nothing at stake at the end of a season that nobody was playing much attention to. Yet that is how James Creighton, as dominant a pitcher as there has ever been, lost his life in the autumn of 1862.”

As Gilbert compiled what would be an incredibly received, COVID-enduring, myth-busting book released in 2020, “How Baseball Happened: Outrageous Lies Exposed! The True Story Revealed” (our review here) something seemed to sit with him that he couldn’t well shake off.

At a time when some 50,000 young men were losing their lives in the Civil War, this one 21-year-old’s death made even less sense.

As Gilbert continued to post blog entries on things he came across in his book research, an essay in March of 2021 titled “The Man Who Invented Modern Pitching — Which Killed Him” seems to have laid the groundwork for expansion of that topic for this book.

It starts: “The story of James Creighton is the oldest and saddest one in the baseball book.”