Until the minor leagues began testing the automated ball-strike calling system a few years ago, I wasn’t that big on the idea. Growing up without the strike zone overlay on televised broadcasts, the strike zone had always been a negotiable airspace that could be manipulated by good pitchers and catchers using the same art of deception they use on hitters against the umpires. The idea of a perfect strike zone never seemed necessary. Tough calls and slick catchers were a part of the game.
However, times and technology have changed, and a consistent strike zone has seemed more and more an inevitability over the last decade. Now that we’re close to the ABS challenge system coming to MLB in 2026, I can’t help wondering if the league’s gambling scandal may push things along faster than anyone anticipated.
Since testing began four years ago in the Florida State League for the 2021 season, the system and challenge process have been improved significantly. Just as importantly, the next wave of young major leaguers and farm hands are now well acclimated to the challenge system, and last spring, everyone got their first taste of it during Grapefruit and Cactus League play. That slow roll out was wise, and implimentation of the challenge system should go pretty smoothly. How veteran players react is a little more of an open question.
It will be interesting to see players of disparate size, say Jose Altuve and Aaron Judge, getting their actual strike zones. The top of the strike zone is now defined as 53 percent of a player’s height, while the bottom is 27 percent of a player’s height. Obviously pitchers are going to have a harder time throwing Altuve a strike than Judge.
Can pitchers adapt to using the corners a little more rather than hoping to get pitches off the edges? How much will this devalue framing, and by default, increase the value of more offensive minded catchers relative to the defensive wizards? It’s hard to gauge how much impact this will have at the major league level. There might only be a handful of challenges per game, but you can bet they’ll be important calls.
Teams adapted almost from the start, teaching their players to use the challenges sparingly. Obviously, you don’t want your hotheaded third baseman challenging a 1-1 call with two outs and no one on base in the second inning of a game unless it is truly, obviously an egregious call guaranteed to be overturned. Players realize quickly that you don’t want to be the guy burning through challenges and leaving your teammates out to dry in big situations later in a game.
So, the challenge system’s time has come, just as a sports gambling scandal rocking the league threatens the game’s integrity. I can’t help wondering if the need to reassure baseball fans and gamblers both that the major leagues are a fair playing field in all respects may now push us to a full ABS system sooner than expected. It seems inevitable, but based on the slow roll out of the challenge system from Indy Ball throught he minor leagues, the league might prefer to let the challenge system work for a few seasons before trying to push full ABS. Concerns about rigging for gambling purposes, particularly on prop bets, might acclerate the process.
Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clasé and Luis F. Ortiz were indicted in federal court in Brooklyn, NY last Sunday. The DOJ has hit them both with bribery, fraud, and conspiracy charges.
For those not really familiar with the story, essentially there are prop bets available, like will the first pitch of an inning be a ball or a strike. You can bet on all sorts of individual game elements, with over/under bets on a given pitchers strikeout total in a game, or a batter’s hit total. Most of these are pretty hard, if not impossible, to manipulate consistently. Clasé, Ortiz, and their alleged accomplices in their scheme, were simply betting on themselves to throw first pitch balls in a given inning, which is obviously well within their control as pitchers.
If they’d been a lot less obvious in their approach, it’s possible this would’ve been pretty hard to detect. While this case will serve as a warning and a “teachable moment” as people like to say, for other players, there will probably still some knuckleheads out there who think they can get away with manipulating game outcomes in minor ways for profit. The other group that could feel some temptation are the umpires. The challenge system might serve as enough of a deterrent on its own, taking the more egregious calls out of their hands at some level, but an umpire can still tip the balance given a big enough sample of calls.
The league will have to be a lot smarter about this going forward and lean on their partners to help them. Because there’s a long history of this kind of thing in sports even before legalized online sports gambling, some fans are already convinced that gambling interests are heavily manipulating outcomes in all sports and that the current scandal is just the tip of the iceberg, a peek into “what’s really going on” behind the scenes. It’s a lot harder to argue against that perspective when the evidence is staring us all in the face right now.
The league’s initial reaction has been to get their gambling partners to limit the type of prop betting on individual pitches that prompted Clasé and Ortiz’s scheme to $200. That seems like a minor effort, but perhaps it’s enough. More than that they need to do a lot better job explaining this to players in terms of how easily they can be caught.
I think it’s fair to be skeptical that it will be enough to deter everyone. People already look at bad umpiring in key games and in the postseason as suspect. The current scandal only adds to those fears that outcomes are being manipulated, whether at the league’s behest or by gambling interests working with either players or umpires. A whole Pandora’s box of issues have been unleashed here and the league and gambling companies were negligent in their lack of foresight. With really serious money being wagered on sporting events, the opportunities for disaster are plentiful. The need to get ahead of potential issues, from rigging for profit to the rising tide of threats against players from losing bettors, should be weighing on a lot of minds in the league offices right now.
The ABS challenge system is going to improve things by giving some recourse to players on really egegrious mistakes by the home plate umpire. More importantly, it’s going to end the umpires’ hold on the game, making it obvious that the league is literally choosing to get a lot of calls wrong by not implementing the ABS system on a full-time basis when it’s already right there in operation. As in other sports, and as baseball has already done with replay challenges, giving human officials the ability and the agency to use technology to do the job better, rather than fearing replacement, is the ideal right now. But the strike zone is a unique element in sports. Going partially automated rather than fully doesn’t make a ton of sense. By simply automating the system you take a lot of potential manipulation out of play and leave the umpires to run the game.
Between those two issues, I think it’s going to be very hard to limit the system to just challenges for very long. Advocates are going to use both those arguments to push for the full system, and I would guess the league is realizing in the midst of the Clasé scandal, that it’s time to consider taking the umpires out of the equation.
That isn’t going to stop the players, and neither is forcing them to make multiple bets or use multiple proxy accounts. Education is probably the best medicine, and the example set by Clasé and Ortiz in ruining their careers and potentially ending up in prison makes for the perfect case study to keep other players from thinking they can easily pull off a scheme like this. But someone always thinks they can beat the system, particulary where money is involved. Ensuring that at least balls and strikes will be called accurately and fairly would elminate subjectivity and the possibility of manipulation from the game in that respect.
We’ll see how the fallout from the scandal plays out, but while the league presents this as an isolated incident they still have a real public relations problem here and so do their partners on the sports gambling side. Legalized sports betting is producing a lot of challenges across sports that the institutions need to deal with.
The gambling scandal and the advent of the ABS system are coming together on a collision course just in time for the CBA negotiations. We’ll see if instituting a fully automated strike zone in 2027 becomes a priority over the next year.