I had it in my mind to write this article a day or so ago after hearing the rankings of MLB teams on successful ABS challenges.
So you’ll forgive me for writing it the day after the Cubs failed on two of three challenges in their loss to the Padres, including one by Matthew Boyd in the first inning, that he later said he shouldn’t have made.
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Here is that challenge [VIDEO].
Yeah, that’s a bad one. Not only because it was pretty clearly a ball, but that’s only the fourth pitch of the game! Perhaps a bit rattled, Boyd wound up walking Ramon Laureano, helping trigger a three-run Padres inning.
But in general, the Cubs have done well in ABS challenges. A new site called Tap to Challenge has taken data that’s been made available by Baseball Savant and sliced and diced it in a number of ways.
This chart shows the Cubs as the sixth-best team overall in challenges at a 60.3 percent success rate (through Monday’s games), just behind the Tigers at 60.4 percent and Mariners at 60.6 percent. The Royals top the leaderboard at 62.3 percent.
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Breaking this down further, Cubs batters rank 17th at 46.2 percent (the D-backs lead at 52.6 percent) and Cubs catchers rank second with a 73.3 percent success rate (the Tigers lead at 85 percent).
Just 41 challenges have been made by pitchers, with 17 being successful (41.4 percent). Boyd’s challenge was the second made by a Cubs pitcher so far this year. The other, which was successful, was by Edward Cabrera on April 11 against the Pirates [VIDEO].
The most challenges by a team’s pitchers is five, by the Yankees. Yankees pitchers have been correct three times. Eight teams (Twins, Royals, Padres, Reds, Blue Jays, Rays, Diamondbacks and Brewers) have not had any challenges by pitchers, and in general, teams are telling pitchers not to challenge. The 41 pitcher challenges are just 2.3 percent of the total of 1,767 challenges made in total by all players.
There’s been some discussion here about whether MLB should eventually go to a full ABS system. Personally, I like the challenge system. It creates some strategy — obviously, losing a challenge in the first inning and both challenges by the third hurt the Cubs Monday night. It gets fans involved, you’ve certainly heard the cheering by home fans when their player is correct.
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Last week at The Athletic, Jayson Stark wrote an article that detailed more of the things I’ve mentioned here, headlined “When will MLB go ‘full ABS,’ let robot umps take over? Maybe never.” I know that’s going to make some of you unhappy, but here’s some of the reasoning:
Do we really want ABS to tell us whether 700,000 pitches a year are balls and strikes? That’s a momentous question because it would be such a momentous change.
“You should only make changes if it makes the game better,” former Cubs/Red Sox/MLB rules visionary Theo Epstein said, as far back as 2023, in an appearance on the Starkville podcast with me and my co-host, Doug Glanville. “You have to figure out exactly what you’re solving for. With ABS, you don’t want to force a solution without a problem.”
Theo is correct, in my view. What if MLB went to a system like this, with umpires no longer used to calling balls and strikes, and the technology went down? Then you’re asking for trouble, in asking people who wouldn’t be doing this important thing to suddenly have to do it accurately.
The article says that for a time in 2023 and 2024, they experimented with full ABS in Triple-A, then surveyed players and fans on the system. The results might surprise you:
Check out the results from this survey, conducted in August 2024. Players and coaches were asked: Which ABS format do you prefer? You might want to look away because “full ABS” is about to take a hellacious drubbing.
Challenge system — 54 percent
Full ABS — 8 percent
Human umps — 38 percent(Source: Major League Baseball)
Eight percent? They were being offered a chance to get every call right, and not even one in 10 wanted that? I think they were trying to tell us something.
Fans in Triple A weren’t quite that vociferous. But it was still more than a 2-to-1 runaway win for the challenge system over full ABS.
Challenge system — 47 percent
Full ABS — 23 percent
Human umps 30 percent(Source: Major League Baseball)
Personally, I think that as the challenge system in MLB gets better because players get better at it, the percentage answering “human umps” in a survey like that would get smaller. And don’t take it only from me, take it from a former player who’s now a Triple-A manager:
Take it from Morgan Ensberg, manager of the Rays’ Triple-A Durham team. He lived through more than 100 games of the full-robot experience. He described those games as having “no color, no spirit.”
“It’s just weird, man,” said Ensberg, a longtime challenge-system fan. “Like, a robotic voice is saying, strike or ball, and you’re going to have problems with that, because you kind of want humans. You know, we all have our brains. And you want to have humans hitting, and humans pitching, and humans calling the games, because we’re going to see things more similarly.”
So that is the “human element” you want. Humans playing and calling the plays, with the technology backing them up. I think that’s a good match. And also, remember this:
Is ABS improving the game?
The answer, from fans who attended games between March 26 and April 19:
Yes — 92 percent
No — 8 percent(Source: Major League Baseball)
We eagerly await the results of independent polling on this topic. But if you’ve spent even one night in a big-league ballpark during the past few weeks, it couldn’t be more obvious. The buzz that accompanies every challenge cartoon on the scoreboard is telling us that the people paying to sit in those seats are gobbling up this stuff.
“I think that one of the virtues of baseball is, we have things that we can argue about in a bar as we’re watching a game,” the same official said. “So one of the things that makes ABS challenge interesting is, you’re sitting there and it’s a 3-2 count, and a guy gets rung up on a called strike in the third inning with a runner on second. And you say: ‘Why the hell didn’t he challenge?’ I think that’s an interesting aspect of the game.”
Remember: If you let those robot umps call every pitch, you lose all of that.
Because in the end, baseball is entertainment. And in my view, the challenge system definitely provides entertainment.
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Stark’s article concludes with some thoughts about where the system might go from here. Maybe you add a third challenge, he cites an unnamed baseball executive, and I could see that happening. The whole article is definitely worth reading, if you haven’t seen it yet.
One last thing and then I’ll let you have at it. Going back to the charts from Tap To Challenge (a fantastic site worth your time), the site also has data on umpires. That’s also worth a look — you’ll find that quite a few umpires have been overturned more than CB Bucknor. Baseball Savant also has quite a bit of ABS data you can peruse.
Read the full article here
