Jeff Passan: ABS is actually revealing how great MLB umpires are doing

Yahoo Sports Daily hosts Caroline Fenton and Jason Fitz are joined by ESPN senior MLB insider Jeff Passan to discuss the impact of the automated ball-strike (ABS) challenge system on how MLB umpires are perceived. Watch the full episode of Yahoo Sports Daily on YouTube or YahooSports.TV.

Video Transcript

Where is the line between like, “Hey, they’re getting it right,” which is the most important thing, but boy, umps are really taking it on the chin right now.

Jason, I actually think this does the opposite.

Because part of the beauty of this ABS system is that when there are misses, it tells you the size of the miss, right?

And when you see the majority of the misses are less than one inch, does that not suggest to you that these men and women who are back there squatting and trying to track in real time pitches that are going up to 105 miles per hour, and that are going side to side up to 25 inches, and that are going top to bottom 30 inches.

Like, the, these unreal movements that happen on a baseball field and that pitchers can generate these days, and that umps are as close as they are.

I look at it like, “Oh my God, these people have been doing incredible work for a long time now,” and that this system’s just here more than anything to catch the egregious ones.

And, that I understand.

Like, when it’s this close and you see it like that, the fans get very excited about that.

But that to me, it’s like ump- umpires are awesome, and this is just a complimentary thing to the great job that they typically do already anyway.

The implementation of ABS, I mean, other than us publicly humiliating some of these umpires- will Major League Baseball have any other consequences for umpires that maybe have a certain number or a certain threshold of calls overturned?

totally fair question.

I think that is to be determined ultimately, because we don’t know at the end of the day, Caroline, how many umpires are really gonna wear it on the chin with this, and we don’t know what the data’s gonna look like.

And, oh, also, by the way, the umpires have a union.

So getting rid of them is a really, really difficult thing to do.

I don’t foresee there being great changes in the umpiring ranks because of this.

But if nothing else, it gives us more data than we had in the past.

And, you know, more data is a better thing, for assessing umpires and for understanding not just who’s the worst, but also who’s the best, and hopefully seeing them be the ones who are handed postseason assignments.

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