In the ninth inning of a recent game, the Cardinals were down two with two outs … and two strikes on the batter.
“You're just trying to compete against him,” Kolten Wong recalled later in the month. “Obviously you're not trying to hit a homer – just make sure you're not an easy out.”
The pitch from righty Raisel Iglesias to the lefty Wong was a 90 mile-per-hour nasty changeup, something of the Carlos Martinez variety.
For pitch-location perspective, the strike zone chart on mlb.com is divided into nine squares, three rows of three.