For the first time ever this month, major league players who disagree with an umpire’s rendering of the strike zone can do something about it. Something other than an exaggerated pantomime of disbelief or a testy reply liable to get them thrown out of the game entirely. They can do something effectual, productive, process-based. They can appeal to a higher power, one that has become revered within the sport for its ability to optimize anything and everything: Technology.
Major League Baseball is testing the challenge system version of the Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS) in roughly 60% of Spring Training games this preseason. In layman’s terms: this spring, players can ask robot umps to review pitch calls.
“It’s fucking great,” says one major league coach. “The best thing since the pitch clock.”
Here’s how it works: Human umpires call balls and strikes as usual, but Hawk-Eye technology – which will already be familiar to fans of sports such as soccer, tennis and cricket – measures each pitch relative to the strike zone. Each team starts the game with two challenges. The batter, catcher, or pitcher can challenge if they disagree with a call – challenges must be issued within seconds and without input from teammates and coaches – by tapping their head. Hawk-Eye then confirms or rejects the challenge. Successful challenges are retained; if the umpire’s call is confirmed, the team loses a challenge.
A single pitch – for example, a called third strike to end an inning with the bases loaded – can swing the trajectory of a whole game. Now, if that moment hinges on a missed call, there’s recourse to right any human error. But it’s still very much in the hands of human actors.
To the league’s credit, testing of the ABS system has been meticulous and incremental – starting nearly six years ago in the independent Atlantic League. Along the way, as trials moved into and up through affiliated ball, the consternation has largely been around getting the strike zone exactly right. For instance, it may seem like the strike zone is a three-dimensional space, but a ball that drops below the zone as it crosses the plate may just barely knick the very front edge of a 3D ABS zone without ever really being hittable. Through trial and adjustment, MLB settled on a two-dimensional rectangular zone positioned over the middle of home plate. The zone also varies in size depending on the height of the batter. In service of this, MLB employed a two-step system of measuring every player earlier this spring to calculate individual strike zones.
But, if we can make every call perfect, why not have ABS judge every pitch? As recently as the start of last season, Triple-A – the highest level of minor league baseball – was using full ABS half the week and the challenge system the rest of the time. But the challenge system emerged as the definitive favorite and MLB opted midseason to commit to it.
Why? First of all, it’s a useful incremental step: it’s easier to ramp up the use of robots rather than retract it, if and when MLB ultimately implements ABS in meaningful major league games. Beyond that, full ABS would radically reshape the role of catchers, with ramifications for the look and feel of the game. And, perhaps most interestingly for fans, as the sport trends toward prescriptive optimization, the game-within-a-game introduced by the challenge system adds back new opportunities for strategy – and new pitfalls for imprudence.
“Some teams probably said, ‘Hey, just do whatever you want,’ but we definitely had a strategy going in,” says Mick Abel, a pitcher in the Philadelphia Phillies system who has experience of ABS when playing at lower levels.
What was the strategy?
“Be smart; don’t blow them in the first few minutes.”
Anything else?
“Use your brain. Don’t let the emotions overcome what you think is right. Just stay neutral about it.”
And since it’s hard to be totally unbiased about your own work, that often means letting catchers handle challenges for the defense.
after newsletter promotion
This seems to be an early consensus in spring: pitchers shouldn’t challenge. Even after he successfully challenged one of his own pitches in an appearance for the Pittsburgh Pirates over the weekend, Caleb Ferguson decided, “I think, in the long run, I’m going to leave that to the catcher.”
In some ways, though, Spring Training is an imperfect test for establishing that kind of understanding of the system. Team priorities are not exactly aligned with the league’s – while MLB would like to see how players use the challenge system in a competitive environment, the teams know a little too well what is (and is not) at stake.
“Why work on a strategy we’re not going to use?” Cincinnati Reds manager Terry Francona said about why he’s told big leaguers to not challenge at all since it won’t be available in the regular season this year.
Rob Thomson, the Philadelphia Phillies manager, came to a similar conclusion for a more subtle reason. He doesn’t want his established guys – for whom spring training is an important warm up but not determinative of whether they make the team – burning challenges that could be used by fringe players, the guys who need every at bat to prove themselves.
“Try to save those challenges for guys who are trying to make the club,” he says, “or [it’s their] first year in the organization, they’re trying to impress.”
If it was implemented in meaningful games, it would be easy enough to adjust that strategy.
“You’d probably try to save one [challenge] for the end, if you can, and big situations. Bases loaded, one out, two-strike pitch with [Bryce] Harper at the plate. Challenge it,” Thomson says. He would like to see teams that burn both challenges earlier in the game get another one in the ninth inning specifically for that reason.
At some point, if the challenge system is in a position to affect meaningful games, front offices will get more involved in analyzing how and when to best deploy them. In the same way they run similar cost-benefit analysis for attempting a stolen base in different situations, they’ll calculate the optimal leverage opportunity to be worth the risk of a borderline challenge.
And like stolen bases, it’s something players could learn to excel at, new ground to eke out a competitive edge. In that way, the addition of robots doesn’t necessarily wrest any of the game away from the people on the field, it just gives them more tools.
