Throughout the illustrious history of \u201cDugout Diaries,\u201d now celebrating its lucky-13th edition, I\u2019ve provided the Daily Trojan readership with an abundance of baseball takes that can only be described as flawless.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAaron Judge deserves MVP<\/a>\u201d? He won it a few months later. \u201cShohei Ohtani is worth $700 million<\/a>\u201d? He led the Los Angeles Dodgers to a World Series title<\/a> with one of the best playoff performances in recent memory. \u201cUSC baseball is back<\/a>\u201d? The Trojans won 12 games in a row following that column \u2026 after already having won seven in a row beforehand.<\/p>\n Yes, dear reader, it seems that whatever I say goes when it comes to baseball \u2014 and with the 2026 MLB season underway, it\u2019s as good a time as ever to deliver some more ball knowledge to the world. But how could I pick just one topic when there\u2019s so much to write about?<\/p>\n \tDaily headlines, sent straight to your inbox. Today, I\u2019ll be trying something a little different: Rather than one cohesive column, I\u2019ve decided to give you three mini-columns, all with the same familiar combination of intelligence and lovable wit.<\/p>\n Consider this an anthology of my biggest takeaways from the first three weeks of the MLB season. A real \u201cThe Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh\u201d (1977), for those of you who had childhoods.<\/p>\n Maybe robots are the future<\/p>\n After years of boos, furious tweets and Kyle Schwarber freakouts directed at MLB umpires, the baseball gods have finally granted us with one of their best inventions yet: automatic balls and strikes. No longer can the sport\u2019s greatest villains decide that a ball three feet out of the zone was actually a strike \u2014 looking at you, \u00c1ngel Hern\u00e1ndez \u2014 unless they want to be embarrassed in front of 40,000 people.<\/p>\n While I haven\u2019t yet had the pleasure of attending a game with the ABS rules in place, I\u2019ve watched plenty from home, and the way fans react to a challenge is electric. Just when you think the other team\u2019s star hitter got a walk, your catcher taps his helmet, and a massive replay graphic appears on the Jumbotron. The ball clipped the corner of the zone \u2014 strike three. The stadium erupts.\u00a0<\/p>\n Unlike your average replay review, which can last several minutes and take you out of a dramatic moment, the ABS challenge is instant. Within seconds of a pitch being challenged, the whole stadium knows whether or not it was a strike. The count gets adjusted; play resumes as normal. It\u2019s a beautiful system.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been an outspoken advocate for many of MLB\u2019s recent rule changes \u2014 thank you, pitch clock \u2014 and the \u201crobot umpires\u201d are no different. The new challenge system preserves the integrity of the game without disrupting its pace in any tangible way, creating a few more exciting moments along the way for a sport often derided as being too \u201cboring.\u201d I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.<\/p>\n Nobody\u2019s actually that good<\/p>\n Well, except for the Dodgers, but that goes without saying. Aside from the trillion-dollar-budget supervillain superteam<\/a>, which is off to a 13-4 start, nobody has established themselves as being particularly great. Only five of the league\u2019s 30 teams are more than three games over .500, and two of those teams are the Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds \u2014 as a lifelong National League Central fan, I promise you that won\u2019t last.<\/p>\n
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