It’s another season of change for Major League Baseball. For the first time ever, hitters and catchers will have the chance to overturn called balls and strikes in official games. Are the days of ejections for arguing balls and strikes over? How do Major League Baseball fans feel about the game’s evolution?
Bryce Eldridge drew a walk in his first plate appearance of yesterday’s 7-5 Cactus League win over the Texas Rangers thanks to the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System that will be in the major leagues this season. Home plate umpire Charlie Welling had called this pitch, some 1.9” off the bottom of the zone, a strike:
Eldridge put his right hand to his batting helmet immediately, signaling for the challenge, which overturned the called strike. It was his second successful challenge in two tries this spring.
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If you’re one of those optimistic Giants fans, then you saw the team’s top prospect flash strike zone awareness that could only fuel that perpetual optimism. He’s got raw power, the well-timed inside out swing, not embarrassing defense at first base, and a Brandon Beltesque awareness of the strike zone? And just 21 years old? Is he too good to be true?
Of course, he challenged a called first strike pitch a couple of innings later and the call was upheld, giving him his first lost challenge of Spring Training, but that’s insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The comedy of manners that has so often been required of hitters and catchers towards umpires falls away to a degree. Rather than indignant players showing up umps or emotionally fragile umpires feeling slighted by even the slightest slump of a shoulder or creak of a catcher’s gear, everybody gets to turn their heads towards The Computer to temporarily outsource their frustrations. It’s a chance for everybody to chill out and, at worst, get the call right.
And the added benefit is that not only do hitters with excellent strike zone judgment now have the chance to right the wrongs of umpiring, the best catchers in the world get to show off how rarely their framing “steals” strikes.
With catchers having the opportunity to challenge calls, Patrick Bailey’s preternatural pitch framing ability might just be supercharged by technology. There were some fears that he’d lose the whole stealing strikes ability, but getting to prove to the umpire that the strike he setup to catch was, indeed, a strike even if the umpire was flummoxed by his positioning or whatever makes the potential loss of a genuine “stolen strike” in a critical moment about a wash. As Andrew Baggarly reports, “Bailey is confident his success rate [for using the ABS Challenge System] will be much higher than the 56 percent overturn rate for catchers who participated in testing last spring.”
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It’s not difficult to imagine an early season scenario where an opposing team is in disbelief that Bailey has been able to catch certain pitches as strikes, be wrong enough to lose their challenges (both teams start with two challenges), and then be vulnerable to the late-game “stolen strike” as a result (though, teams out of challenges are refreshed with one new challenge in extra innings).
But what about you, MLB fans? This fundamentally changes the game. The sanctity of umpire (mis)judgment has been eroding for some time thanks to the disruption provided by technology, and that loss of the human element to what is a very human game is sure to ruffle some feathers of the stodgiest and hardiest of die hards. Are you looking forward to hitters and catchers having the chance to show up the umps or swing at bats — and games — in your team’s favor with a simple challenge? SB Nation took an MLB Reacts poll to get a sense of the mood.
SB Nation MLB Reacts poll that reads, “82% of MLB fans like the new ABS Challenge System”
That’s an overwhelming result, but it makes a lot of sense. Getting the call right is a widely held belief and in a game that can be as cruel as baseball, the ABS Challenge System might just be a sorely needed pain reliever.
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On the other hand, as great as technology can be, the ABS Challenge System isn’t flawless. It will change the aesthetics of the game in a way that longtime fans might not ever get used to in their (okay, our) lifetimes. And it’s not like fan opinion gets it right every time. Most fans want a salary cap, for instance. But anyway, here’s an example of this changed aesthetic:
We’ll have a lot more games ended on challenged pitches, and it’s unclear at the moment what side comes out ahead. Last March, Baseball Prospectus looked at situations similar to the video embedded above, where walk-off walks might’ve been overturned and changed to a called third strike. The fact remains that “the human element” of the game does get lost as technology suffuses it, and it’s not really a question of a tradeoff because, again, decision-making is being outsourced to a machine. We’ll probably see fewer no hitters or perfect games and fewer wild swings with stellar results just as the humans paid to play and call the game conform their behaviors to the system established by ABS. What do we gain from that beyond “getting the call right”? I think that’s a philosophical question meant to be answered in an internet comment section.
That said, the commentariat have spoken to an extent, and would seem to have a gut instinct that leads them in the opposite direction of the game-ending examples cited above:
SB Nation MLB Reacts poll graphic: 71% of MLB fans think the ABS Challenge System will benefit hitters more than pitchers
This makes a lot of sense. Fans think players get dinged for falsely called strikes a lot of the time. They’re probably going to be surprised by how many times that’s not the case and how often umpires miss strikes, but generally speaking, this is sound. It’s always been two against one with a pitcher and catcher ganging up on the hitter and so ABS would seem to be a solution to that problem by making technology a hitter’s partner.
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But you can bet the Giants are one of the few teams already in position to benefit from the rule change, not just because Bryce Eldridge has excellent strike zone judgment but because their lineup core of Rafael Devers, Matt Chapman, and (to a lesser extent) Willy Adames have a combined career OBP of .333 (the league average the past four seasons is around .315) and Patrick Bailey’s catching ability is already the best in the world. Now he gets to enhance it with technology while leading a staff that doesn’t need strikeouts to be effective, but will certainly be even better with more called strikes added to the mix.
It has been said that the Giants’ dynasty of the 2010s came to a quick and painful end once Statcast was installed in all 30 stadiums and it has felt like the franchise has been playing catchup with technology ever since. Their roster was never — and still mostly isn’t — setup to take advantage of the recent changes that enhance stolen bases, either. The ABS Challenge System would seem to be the first new industry standard they’re setup to gain from at the outset and that’s a very exciting proposition, whether you’re a diehard “human element” fan or a fan who would pay to see androids play.