You can’t spell “ABS” without a little “BS” at the end. If all Earl Weaver has to do to win an argument at home plate is kick a plug out of the wall, is it really baseball?
“People used to say we were the integrity of the game, that the umpires held the integrity of the game,” former Major League Baseball ump Paul Emmel told me Thursday morning. “And the integrity of the game is being removed from the umpires.
“You want to bring the technology to make people be better, bring technology to help me be better. But in this instance, I’m not sure it accomplished that goal. I think it’s removing the integrity of the game.”
The Rockies lift the lid on their 2026 season Friday in Miami with a pinch of history on the side. It’ll be the first regular-season MLB game in Colorado history to use robotic umpires — or rather, to use robo-ump oversight.
Major League Baseball this year is debuting its Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System, in which batters, pitchers or catchers can instantly appeal a ball or strike call at home plate.
All calls will be checked by a framework that utilizes the 12 Hawk-Eye cameras that are universal to all MLB parks. According to Baseball Savant, MLB’s advanced stats page, ABS will judge balls and strikes from a zone with a width of 17 inches (same as home plate), with the top of the zone altered by batter to 53.5% of a player’s listed height without cleats, and a bottom set at 27% of the player’s listed height. Strikes/balls are judged when a ball passes the middle of the plate, not the front of it.
“But each player has a different strike zone,” said Emmel, who retired in July 2024 and calls Castle Rock home. “I don’t know if anybody (who calibrates ABS) has ever seen Greg Maddux, who can miss the front edge of the plate and hit the back of the strike zone. I don’t know if they’ve ever seen Justin Verlander’s high curveball fall from 12 to 6, hit the high side of the strike zone and then hit the catcher in the legs.”
Emmel, 57, isn’t some fogey who’s into yelling at clouds and telling the tech kids to get off his lawn. But he is proudly old-school by nature. And an even prouder Artificial Intelligence (AI) skeptic.
The Michigan native, who made his MLB debut in 1999 and worked a World Series, three League Championship Series, eight Division Series and two All-Star games over the next two-plus decades, has seen some … stuff.
Paul recalled to me how he worked a playoff tilt once and was in the locker room pregame watching Yankees-Blue Jays on TV next to Joe Torre and Jim Leyland. All of a sudden, the strike-zone box disappeared from the broadcast feed.
“I remember calls being made,” Emmel chuckled. “And I’m paraphrasing here, but the person on the phone said that the person who set the box on the TV got tired and went home.
“So, we’re looking around the room like, ‘What?’”
Which, in hindsight, is how one becomes an AI apostate.
Look, Emmel never professed to be perfect, which is also his point. He’s been good, though — the website, umpscorecard.com, graded the Colorado resident as having 91.65% accuracy on calls from 2015-2022.
His peers, past and present, have been getting better, too. In 2025, according to MLB, umps recorded a 92.83% accuracy rate on ball/strike calls, the best percentage ever recorded by the league, and up more than three points from 2016 (89.31%). The umpires’ 10.88 missed calls per game were down from 16.58 misses nine years earlier.
“I get it in tennis,” Emmel continued. “But what’s next for baseball (once this) conversation (moves) down the road? Right now, the only things that are out there and subjective are check swings and balks. How do you take check swings and balks out of our hands?
“I called a balk against Oakland (in 2004), and I was wrong. And I was right for the wrong reasons. Are they going to be able to challenge check swings? Are they going to be able to challenge balks?”
Curious, I reached out earlier this week to a current MLB umpire I know to talk about ABS. Citing league policy, he respectfully declined to comment. Emmel told me he thinks the crews dealing with the new tech are “less than cautiously optimistic … I would say very skeptical” about ABS going forward.
“We’ve seen boxes move each game. If you’ve got Aaron Judge (who stands 6-foot-7) and Jose Altuve (5-6), you’re changing the box … I know in and out, up and down. How do I know where your boxes are?
“You’re always going to have a pitch (being missed) here or there. But (with) the statistics in baseball, it all washes out in the end.”
Like a lot of us, Emmel jumped into some deep convos about the pros and cons of AI these days. He’s got friends who run businesses. He’s got friends in the tech industry. He wrestles with AI usage with UMPS CARE, a nonprofit founded by MLB umpires of which he serves as vice president.
“And I find fault (in some CEOs’) arguments,” said Emmel, who’ll host UMP CARE’s annual “Fairway to the Rockies” golf outing at Red Hawk Ridge Golf Course on June 11. “On one hand, you can’t turn a blind eye to something new that’s coming through the tunnel. On the other hand, God creates us to be human, and that human interaction and that human empathy — those are things that aren’t computerized.”
Being 100% right on calls, being 100% certain, absolutely matters, Emmel says. But once you’ve opened Pandora’s box when it comes to homogenization in baseball, he wondered, where does it end? Variance, human variance, quirky variance, has always been at the core of The Show.
Baseball used to be the only major North American sport that didn’t use a clock of some kind. It’s still the only major North American sport in which the dimensions of the playing field vary widely by city and venue. Although Emmel wonders how long that last one will last.
“The argument was that in baseball, there are all these (quirks) we’ve used to elevate this sport in culture, and all those things were good,” Emmel said. “But now all those things seem to be bad. They didn’t have this technology back in the ’70s, when they were playing two-hour games.”
Which is why Emmel’s not a fan of the pitch clock, either. He says it takes away from conversations. And that baseball has always been a conversational game — pitcher to catcher, catcher to umpire, hitter to umpire, first baseman to runner, shortstop to second baseman, third baseman to his coach.
“The game’s gone silent,” Emmel said. “And I don’t think that’s going to save the game.”
The other day, to decompress, Emmel took a lawn chair out to a park, cracked open a 6-pack and watched some local kids play baseball. Know what? He didn’t yell at a single cloud. Not once.
“And I don’t know that I would get the same enjoyment out of going to a big-league game anymore,” Emmel sighed. “I don’t understand where it’s going.”