Well, at least not without enough ancillary rules that the effect of stance would be greatly minimized. I learned from this article (and assuming for this post that the description within is accurate) that the ABS system in the minors recently switched from a player-height-based zone to determining a zone by actually measuring (a rolling average of) a batter’s actual stance. It should have been obvious that such a system would be completely untenable in MLB.
The system measures the zone as the crook of the knee to a baseball’s height above the belt. I, a not particularly flexible guy, can adopt a deep squat and get a strike zone of maybe an inch in vertical dimension by that definition. Of course I couldn’t swing with any power standing like that, but why would I ever swing when I could be a much better offensive player than prime Barry Bonds just by standing still and walking over 90% of the time? There’s clearly a problem here. (as well as the similar exploit of jumping with the pitch and drawing your knees up to get a small and absurdly high zone)
Amusingly enough, this system might come close to working as-is in exactly the minor leagues because W-L record isn’t that important, no players want to stay there, and a bullshit-fueled .900+ OBP isn’t going to get you called up to the show, so there’s no incentive for players or teams to go all-in on gaming the system. At the MLB level where the incentives are the exact opposite- winning is hugely important and you’re not likely to get sent down to AAA for doing it via bullshit, absurd stances should appear immediately.
And the problems aren’t limited to just completely refusing to ever engage with any pitched ball- copping a squat any time you’re going to take anyway- and you have time to present a normal stance and then squat between the start of the delivery and the ball reaching the plate when the measurement is made- would be enough to significantly shrink your overall zone. I could definitely see this kind of exploit happening even in the minors.
So, clearly, this situation wouldn’t be allowed to happen (or wouldn’t be allowed to last if MLB is somehow obtuse enough to actually implement the current AAA version), so how would it be prevented? Well, there would need to be a minimum vertical zone size, and to prevent absurdity, it’s also likely that the bottom of the zone would have a minimum and maximum height off the ground. And what could those be based off of? Player height, or some kneecap/navel measurement or something, and not much else.
Once you have a minimum vertical zone size (for a given player height), having any variability in that size still incentivizes absurd stances on as many takes as possible, and nobody wants to have to do that (or feel like they should do that) or to regularly see it. So the vertical zone size (for a given player height) should fairly clearly not depend at all on stance. As to the last question, where the zone is actually located, stance could possibly play a role there. I don’t think it’s a great idea to anchor the bottom of the zone based on historical stance, but I expect it’s what will happen for inertial reasons, and using stance only to determine the bottom of a defined-size zone isn’t a total disaster.
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