The news hit earlier this week that Major League Baseball is officially going all-in on the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System for the 2026 season, postseason included. It’s being sold as a compromise — a nice, safe middle ground. Human umpires will still make the initial call from behind the plate, but now every team gets two challenges per game to send the decision upstairs, or rather, to the computer. If you win the challenge, you keep it. If you lose, you don’t.
But let’s be honest about what this system really is: a checkmate on the human heart of the game. The home plate umpire, traditionally the ultimate, final authority, has been officially relegated. They are no longer the judge; they are just the first step in a 15-second data-processing chain.
The pursuit of integrity has become a quest for sterility. Yes, umpires are remarkably accurate, getting roughly 94% of pitches correct. But the ABS system’s entire goal is to eradicate that remaining 6% of human error. We are trading a tiny, unpredictable margin of error for a significant loss of atmosphere and emotion. The review process will supposedly be fast — averaging just 13.8 seconds in testing — and that’s exactly the problem. The speed ensures that no organic dramatic tension, no conflict, can ever build from a disagreement. We are substituting raw passion for analytical acceptance.
Think about what we are losing in the process: the glorious, spontaneous theater of baseball. For generations, the quintessential baseball moment was the managerial meltdown. The sudden rush from the dugout, the shouting, the pointing, the dirt-kicking, and the inevitable, glorious ejection. These explosions, often triggered by a close ball or strike call, gave the crowd a show and rallied the players against a perceived injustice.
Over 60% of all ejections for players, managers, and coaches in recent seasons were related to balls and strikes. The ABS system is designed explicitly to systematically cut that number down. By eliminating the close, debatable call, we eliminate the conflict that defined the sport’s most volatile scenes. There’s simply no one left to yell at when the pitch result is instantaneously confirmed by a glowing graphic on the scoreboard. The umpire ceases to be a villain, and the manager’s act of defiance is rendered pointless. Furthermore, the protocol explicitly states that the manager can’t even signal for the challenge — it has to come from the pitcher, catcher, or batter, signaled by a simple tap of the cap or helmet. Goodbye, charge from the dugout; hello, polite head tap.
But the biggest, most tragic thing in this technological war on human skill is the catcher. For decades, the best catchers were revered for the subtle, specialized art of pitch framing — the ability to steal strikes by smoothly receiving a pitch just outside the zone and convincing the umpire it was a strike. It was a beautiful, nuanced physical argument.
Now, it is largely obsolete. Commissioner Rob Manfred himself noted that the eradication of framing is one of the biggest negatives cited by players, fueling a legitimate concern about the potential death of the defense-first catcher. Why? Because a pitch that is framed perfectly, but technically outside the zone, is instantly erased by the Hawk-Eye system. Athletic artistry is being systematically rejected if it can be overridden by a computer’s definition. The game’s new priority for catchers is shifting away from receiving skill; now, the ability to control the running game becomes far more valuable than stealing strikes. The new skill set isn’t about physical performance, it’s about strategic gambling: knowing when to use one of those precious challenges. Sure, catchers are still the best judges of the zone, successfully appealing 56% of their challenges during spring testing, but that’s a strategy for undoing error, not a creative athletic contribution.
We can’t discuss this without talking about the zone itself, which, for all its accuracy, is deeply unsatisfying. The ABS system enforces a rigid, machine-defined strike zone: a uniform, two-dimensional rectangular prism measured only at the midpoint of the plate. The boundaries are fixed percentages of the batter’s height, with the top set at about 53.5%.
Here’s the thing, folks: This rigid geometry clashes with the reality of baseball. The human zone was always described as somewhat oval, carrying a probabilistic gray area where calls, while sometimes incorrect, balanced out over a long season. Furthermore, the official rule book states that a pitch is a strike if it crosses any part of the three-dimensional strike zone, yet the ABS system only measures at the midpoint. It ignores the batter’s stance entirely. This forces pitchers to aim for geometric precision rather than relying on athletic execution, encouraging a sterile, exploit-driven style of pitching focused on hitting the corner of a machine-defined rectangle.
With that… We are being told this system eliminates the really big misses and improves the integrity. But the most iconic, unforgettable, and narrative-defining moments in baseball history — the controversial phantom tag, the pivotal strike-three calls, the legendary blowups — were born from human fallibility. These errors created rivalries, fueled arguments for decades, and ensured that the decisive moment of a game was weighted by the immense responsibility placed on one man. When every crucial pitch can be appealed and instantly sanitized by a glowing graphic, that dramatic weight disappears. We are making the game technically perfect, and in doing so, we are making it far less interesting.
If you cannot play with them, then root for them even if the ABS system ruins that game for you!