I’ve gotten downright prolific with my abilities to tweak and cajole Copilot into finding increasingly realistic and copyirght-be-damned ways to provide images for these musings that my thoroughly untalented fingers couldn’t possibly come close to drawing. I’ve embraced my bestie’s increasingly growing reliance on Chat GPT to provide her pointed guidance and insight for how to maximize her income and demeanor and even taken advantage of its “talents” myself. And I recently had my Waymo cherry broken and lived to talk about it, thank you very much. So I’m anything but a cloud yeller when it comes to embracing the concept of AIs and LLMs infiltrating my life.
But I’m still not quite used to ABS, and I’m honestly not sure how I’ll react when I finally see it in action myself in person at an MLB game. For those who have during the first week of spring training, the experience is still more than a little jarring. The official chronicler of all things weird and wonderful about baseball, THE ATHLETIC’s “Hall of FAMER Jayson Stark, did his absolute best to man-splain in his own patented eye-rolling way in a piece authored earlier this week:
MLB’s Automated Ball-Strike challenge system (ABS) is up and running this spring. And unlike last year, when this was just a fun experiment, this time that challenge system will remain once the real games start…this is not the latest “Star Wars” installment, and it’s not a laughing matter. Those robot umpires are here to stay.
The rules will be the same as the ones used in Triple A and in big-league spring training last season. Each team gets two challenges per game. If it gets a challenge right, it keeps that challenge. If it gets that challenge wrong, it loses a challenge. Only hitters, catchers and pitchers have the power to challenge — and they need to do that within two seconds of the umpire’s call. They’re being told they have to both tap their head and verbally challenge so there’s no confusion..
(W)hen I think about how many catchers will have a challenge in their pocket with two outs in the ninth, I’m pretty much guaranteeing a game-ending, um, what exactly: A “tap-off”? A “gawk-off”? A “squawk-off”? A “robot-off”? Can’t wait for that.
Well, that hasn’t happened yet. But we did get many extended sportscast segments intent on showing off warm weather to a still-snow-shocked nation earlier this week on what happened to one unfortunate human umpire, and naturally THE NEW YORK POST’s
One umpire had five calls consecutively overturned by the automated ball-strike challenge system during Tuesday’s Pirates-Red Sox Grapefruit League spring training game in Fort Myers, Fla.
Home plate umpire Mitch Trzeciak must have been red in the face when a number of his calls were challenged and overturned. But he later earned himself a sarcastic cheer when one call was upheld by ABS.
It started in the first inning when Pirates catcher Endy Rodriguez challenged a ball call on a pitch from Carmen Mlodzinski, and the ABS review very clearly showed the ball was a strike and went essentially right down the middle. NESN play-by-play man Tom Caron couldn’t help but point out the obvious error by saying, “And that one, kind of right down the middle.” Caron continued to point out the rough day that Trzeciak was having during the broadcast. “You’ve missed two, and one was right down the middle, and one was two inches outside, and you’re like, ‘Alright, I’m having a bad day, and everybody knows it,’” Caron said later on in the broadcast.
In the end, Trzeciak, a Triple-A umpire getting a chance to call a big league game, had five calls that were overturned by the challenge system before the end of the third.
Which if one considers the deep dive that MLB.com’s Mike Petriello authored this week, was likely not the first time Tezeciak had been shown up–just arguably the most well-covered:
(W)e have more than just a few days’ worth of spring data at hand, too, because all of this was in effect at Triple-A in 2025. Now available on Baseball Savant’s ABS dashboard, we can get a pretty good idea of how real pro ballplayers handled the sport’s newest wrinkle.
Almost every Triple-A game last year, 98.5% of them to be exact, saw at least one challenge. But only one in six games had four or more overturned calls – and 61% of games had two or fewer overturns.
In Triple-A in 2025, the overturn rate was almost exactly 50%. Batters weren’t as good (45% success rate) as fielders (nearly 55%). (As for what specifically we mean by “fielders,” more on that below.) Those numbers correlate reasonably well with what we’ve seen in the first few days of 2026 Spring Training – the overturn rate is 52%, and batters aren’t as good (48% success rate) as fielders (55%).
Petriello makes a living doing these sort of dives, and his full piece is to a researcher like moi an absolutely fascinating read. I have a sneaking suspicion he and others with his skill sets are gonna become as familiar to baseball fans as FOX SPORTS’ Mike Periera or CBS SPORTS’ Gene Steratore have become to their respective NFL games’ audiences, both ex-referees who have become integral parts of acting as arbiters and sedatives on coaches’ challenges in those games. Somebody’s gotta keep announcers like Caron in check. At least for now, that’s still one job a robot can’t do.
Courage…