{"id":337371,"date":"2025-09-24T04:46:20","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T04:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/337371\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T04:46:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T04:46:20","slug":"look-for-robot-umpires-in-major-league-baseball-next-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/337371\/","title":{"rendered":"Look for robot umpires in major league baseball next year"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK (AP) \u2014\u00a0Robot umpires<\/a>\u00a0are getting called up to the big leagues next season.<\/p>\n

Major League Baseball\u2019s 11-man competition committee on Tuesday approved use of the Automated Ball\/Strike System in the\u00a0major leagues<\/a>\u00a0in 2026.<\/p>\n

Related:\u00a0 Future major league hopefuls get their chance at America First Square<\/a><\/p>\n

Human plate umpires will still call balls and strikes, but baseball teams can challenge two calls per game and get additional appeals in extra innings. Challenges must be made by a pitcher, catcher or batter \u2014 signaled by tapping their helmet or cap \u2014 and a team retains its challenge if successful. Reviews will be shown as digital graphics on outfield videoboards.<\/p>\n

New York Yankees outfielder Austin Slater, one of four players on the competition committee, said three voted in favor after getting support from 22 of the 30 teams. All six management reps voted in favor.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think with any sort of technology, there\u2019s not 100% certainty of the accurateness of the system,\u201d Slater said. \u201cI think the same can be said of umpires. So I think it\u2019s just coming to grips with the impact that technology is going to have and whether or not we were willing to live with that error that was associated with the system, even if the error is very, very miniscule.\u201d<\/p>\n

Big league umpires call roughly 94% of pitches correctly, according to UmpScorecards.<\/p>\n

Adding the robot umps is likely to cut down on ejections. MLB said 61.5% of ejections among players, managers and coaches last year were related to balls and strikes, as were 60.3% this season through Sunday. The figures include ejections for derogatory comments, throwing equipment while protesting calls and inappropriate conduct.<\/p>\n

Yankees manager Aaron Boone, who leads the American League in ejections for the fifth straight year, called the adoption \u201cinevitable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThroughout the year, I\u2019ve been a little not totally on board with it or exactly how it\u2019s going to be implemented but it\u2019s going to be here and hopefully that\u2019s a good thing,\u201d he said. \u201cA lot of the things that Major League Baseball has done I think have been really successful in the changes they\u2019ve made and hopefully this is another one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said players will have to adjust.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can like it, dislike it, it doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d Vogt said as Cleveland prepared to open a critical three-game series with Detroit. \u201cIt\u2019s coming. It\u2019s going to change the game. It\u2019s going to change the game forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

ABS, which utilizes Hawk-Eye cameras, has been tested in minor league baseball since 2019. The independent Atlantic League trialed the system<\/a>\u00a0at its 2019 All-Star Game and MLB installed the technology for that year\u2019s\u00a0Arizona Fall League of top prospects<\/a>. The ABS was tried at\u00a0eight of nine ballparks of the Low-A Southeast League in 2021<\/a>, then\u00a0moved up to Triple-A in 2022<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At Triple-A at the start of the 2023 season, half the baseball games used the robots for ball\/strike calls and half had a human making decisions subject to appeals<\/a>\u00a0by teams to the ABS.<\/p>\n

Major League Baseball switched Triple-A to an all-challenge system on June 26, 2024, then used the challenge system this year at 13 spring training ballparks hosting 19 teams<\/a>\u00a0for a total of 288 exhibition games. Teams won 52.2% of their ball\/strike challenges (617 of 1,182).<\/p>\n

\u201cI love it. I loved it in spring training,\u201d Phillies manager Rob Thomson said. \u201cNot all of the players, but most of the players, if you ask them, they really liked it too. I think it keeps everybody accountable. It keeps everybody on their toes.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Triple-A this season, the average challenges per game increased to 4.2 from 3.9 through Sunday and the success rate dropped to 49.5% from 50.6%. Defenses were successful in 53.7% of challenges this year and offenses in 45%.<\/p>\n

In the first test at the big league All-Star Game, four of five challenges of plate umpire Dan Iassogna\u2019s calls were successful in July.<\/p>\n

Teams in Triple-A baseball do not get additional challenges in extra innings. The proposal approved Tuesday included a provision granting teams one additional challenge each inning if they don\u2019t have challenges remaining.<\/p>\n

Major League Baseball has experimented with different shapes and interpretations of the strike zone with ABS, including versions that were three-dimensional. Currently, it calls strikes solely based on where the ball crosses the midpoint of the plate, 8.5 inches from the front and the back. The top of the strike zone is 53.5% of batter height and the bottom 27%.<\/p>\n

\u201cThroughout this process we have worked on deploying the system in a way that\u2019s acceptable to players,\u201d Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. \u201cThe strong preference from players for the challenge format over using the technology to call every pitch was a key factor in determining the system we are announcing today.\u201d<\/p>\n

This will be Major League Baseball\u2019s first major rule change since sweeping adjustments in 2024<\/a>. Those included a pitch clock, larger bases, and restrictions on defensive shifts and pitcher disengagements such as pickoff attempts.<\/p>\n

The challenge system introduces ABS without eliminating pitch framing, a subtle art where catchers use their body and glove to try making borderline pitches look like strikes. Framing has become a critical skill for big league catchers, and there was concern that full-blown ABS would make some strong defensive catchers obsolete.<\/p>\n

In addition to Slater, other baseball players on the competition committee are Arizona\u2019s Corbin Burnes and Zac Gallen, Detroit\u2019s Casey Mize and Seattle\u2019s Cal Raleigh, with the Chicago Cubs\u2019 Ian Happ at Detroit\u2019s Casey Mize as alternates. The union representatives make their decisions based on input from players on the 30 teams.<\/p>\n

Bill Miller is the umpire representative.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

AP MLB:\u00a0https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/MLB<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014\u00a0Robot umpires\u00a0are getting called up to the big leagues next season. Major League Baseball\u2019s 11-man…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2392],"tags":[5,220,5179,5178,620,4,619,65,3235,185,219,218,217],"class_list":{"0":"post-337371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-seattle-mariners","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-home","10":"tag-ksltv-com","11":"tag-ksltv-com-utah-news","12":"tag-mariners","13":"tag-mlb","14":"tag-seattle","15":"tag-seattle-mariners","16":"tag-seattlemariners","17":"tag-sports","18":"tag-talk-and-community","19":"tag-traffic","20":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/115257460976836367","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}