The doctor said he would never walk again. Well, Steve Palermo does walk. It took him three years. And that's not bad when you consider it has taken him nearly six years to get umpires to start calling the rule-book strike zone. III Nobody knows why umpires stopped calling strikes.
Nobody knows how it happened.
Palermo, once the best ball-strike umpire in baseball, has his own theory about it. A belt-high fastball was clearly a mistake. Umpires started calling the belt-high pitch a ball. And then a little below the belt was a ball. And then a little lower.