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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: ABSolute Beginnings
Vol. 18, No. 13
April 2, 2025
The only thing anyone wants to talk about is the new system for challenging ball and strike calls. Sandy Alcantara throws a shutout, the Brewers start 5-1, the baseballs are still dead...no, it’s all taking a back seat to the implementation of an automated system for getting called pitches correct. If you remember the Torpedo Bat Era (March 29, 2025 - April 3, 2025), you’ll recognize the same energy today.
As someone who would just as soon see all pitch calls made by the automated system (ABS), I consider the new rules a half-measure. They put the onus on the players to officiate the game, they gamify a part of baseball that should be straightforward, and they still do not get enough of the calls right. Players, especially hitters, have seemed reluctant to trust their judgment given the cost of losing a challenge, so many pitches thrown outside the zone remain strikes. MLB has enormous quantities of information on who is challenging and how often calls are being reversed, but it’s the pitches outside that data set, the ones that go unchallenged by choice or by rule, that are more interesting to me.
Thanks to all that data collection, we’re hearing a lot of conversation about which teams and players have been most successful at challenges. I gave up being the small-sample police a long time ago, so go crazy with it. Me, I am not sure at all that challenging will actually be revealed as a skill. I am sure that if it is, we won’t be able to suss it out before Easter Sunday. If you want to jump to conclusions, you can, just keep in mind that as I write this, the Marlins are in first place, Joey Wiemer leads the league in hitting, Liam Hicks leads in RBI, and Paul Skenes has an ERA of 9.53.
I have two genuine takeaways from the first week of challenges:
They’re fast, but still too slow, by choice. The actual time it takes to discern and communicate the correct call to the home-plate umpire should be maybe five seconds. The umpire shouldn’t have to move to get the word that the call stands or is changed. Instead, we get this elaborate production; the umpire turns to the crowd and the press box and announces “The batter is challenging the pitch.” Then he steps to the side to watch the largest video board in the park run a T-Mobile ad wrapped around a visualization of the pitch, mound to plate, followed by a verdict and, and if the call was wrong, a display of the distance by which it was wrong.
The only important words in that graf are “T-Mobile ad.”
A process that should take five seconds and be mostly invisible takes 15 with dance moves because MLB is making a buck off it. I’ve talked about this in the context of commercial time; MLB has jumped through all kinds of hoops to shorten games, but when it comes time for the playoffs, they sell extra commercials because they value their cash more than your time.
Should I care about the extra ten seconds? It’s not just the time, it’s the elaborate process n the service of an ad that bugs me. We’ve had at-bats with multiple challenges, we’ve had half-innings with three, four, five challenges, and maybe it is just me, but I am already sick of that visualization and all that bright pink.
It doesn’t have to be this way and it shouldn’t be this way. Just buzz the ump with the correct call and move on. You won’t miss the T-Mobile money, there’s probably another gambling deal just around the corner.
We’re too focused on the close calls. Many of the visualizations have shown pitches to be just barely inside or just barely outside the zone, and changed accordingly. This has caused some consternation about whether the umpire’s call should be reversed in these instances. I think this is a silly conversation that mistakenly centers the umpire and his call as opposed to the what the players did. I care where the ball was relative to the strike zone, not where the umpire thought it was relative to the strike zone.
As I have said any number of times, umpires are mostly guessing on the edges, using the count, the game state, the catcher’s movement, and other cues to push them to one call or the other. This isn’t an indictment of them as people or professionals -- the job of calling pitches is simply too difficult for humans to do given modern pitching.
The focus on the close ones, though, has served to block out the single best thing about ABS: The near-elimination of utterly ridiculous strike calls. I accept that umps are largely flipping coins on pitches just inside or outside of the zone. What I never accepted were the strike calls on pitches that never came near the plate, the ones called strikes because the pitcher “hit the target” or “had earned that pitch,” or “because I want to do my little punchy dance.” Those were the ones distorting the pitcher/batter relationship, slowing down the game as the pitcher chased those strikes, and raising the overall strikeout rate.
A process that started last year with the umps being graded differently continues now with ABS, which gives batters recourse on those pitches that were simply never supposed to be called strikes. I have to be honest, what I’ve mostly noticed is fewer of those pitches even being called strikes to begin with, and with that, fewer attempts by pitchers and catchers to exploit the old hole in the system.
In a soft-focus feature on the beleaguered umpires, Sam Blum quotes Jim Joyce:
Jim Joyce, who has umpired three World Series and three All-Star games said he’s talked to other active umpires, and, “They feel the strike zone has changed.”
Well, yes, Jim, it has changed: You can’t call balls strikes with impunity any more.
Taking those strikes out of the game is the single biggest benefit of the challenge system. It’s a huge win for the watchability of baseball and a step in the direction of creating more balls in play.
The half-life of challenge talk will exceed that of torpedo-bat discourse, in part because of the hot-pink billboards we’ll see a half-dozen times a game all year long. As the season goes on, though, keep in mind that the most interesting parts of the challenge system may be the ones we can’t easily count: The pitches that go unchallenged, and the pitches well outside the zone that are no longer called strikes, and often not even thrown.
