Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it’s free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though. That’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.
I’ve long since realized and accepted that one of the things we sports fans — yes, I’m including myself — excel at is complaining. Still, I reserve the right to push back on some of these complaints from time to time and that’s one of the main reasons I have this particular column. People get to complain and I get to complain in return while explaining how wrong they are. Win-win.
There are especially a litany of complaints any time there’s something new. People innately fear change. And, of course, if you slap a hearty dose of technology on top of said change, that only increases both the complaints and the intensity of the complaints.
The funny thing about the implementation of the automated ball-strike system to challenge pitch calls is Major League Baseball is only using it on a trial period during spring training. This isn’t like the pitch clock that caused so many people to freak out a few years ago — and it’s not only made the game move along at a much better pace, but the disaster I was told was on the horizon never happened.
Something else funny about the complaints on a challenge system using ABS is how often many of the same people complain about umpires missing balls and strikes calls.
I think a lot of people — including the person emailing me to say that “this is real life, not a video game!” — just don’t realize how quickly the system works. Watch this unfold in real time and ask what in the world is wrong with fixing this missed call by the home-plate umpire?
To those who might ask, “well, yeah, but does it always happen that fast?” the answer is yes. I’ve seen it happen in minor-league games the past two years. It adds maybe five extra seconds to the game per challenge.
Now, let’s be clear: This shouldn’t happen every single pitch. I just talked about an added five seconds and if we were doing that every single pitch, it would be lunacy. I do want this system to be implemented for regular-season and playoff games soon, but there has to be a limit. In this spring training trial, teams are limited to two per game and retain the challenge if they “win” it. There still won’t be many. If there were, say, three challenges per team per game, they would be focused on what appear to be the most egregious misses by the home-plate umpire.
Every single one of us over the years has complained more times than we care to count about missed calls that hurt our favorite team. When it happens in a big spot, it’s a crushing blow that doesn’t feel fair. What if those could be fixed? Of course we should do that! To the people who might point out, yeah, but complaining about balls and strikes is part of the fabric of the game, I agree with you. We wouldn’t lose that. There are hundreds of pitches a game and I’m suggesting to max out at six challenges.
Again, it cannot happen on most pitches, nor does it need to. The home-plate umpires in Major League Baseball are excellent at their job. It’s an incredibly difficult job, too, especially with the type of stuff pitchers these days possess. The average fastball last season was more than 94 miles per hour. Back in 2002, it was lower than 90. Do we need to discuss how many more breaking pitches there are nowadays and all the different ways they move? As such, working home plate in an MLB game these days is exponentially more difficult than it was decades ago. And while these umpires are amazing at getting it right, they do miss from time to time and they are human beings trying to judge in real time with the naked eye.
Anyone who has ever officiated at a high level before would tell you that they’d much rather have a mistake fixed than be known as the official who ruined a game with a missed call, so there shouldn’t be any pushback from the umpire side. Don’t you think Jim Joyce wished there was replay review on Armando Galarraga’s would-be perfect game?
An added wrinkle here is this wouldn’t go to the dugout where we have a drawn-out period of time before the manager decides to challenge or not. During the first year of replay, it was insufferable watching the managers kill time before deciding whether or not to challenge. It’s been streamlined better now, but this ABS thing is a totally different discussion entirely. It’s the hitter, catcher or pitcher who would immediately need to call for a challenge. There would be some team-wide strategy once a team only had one challenge remaining, too, because surely teams would want to keep one in the holster for late-game situations that could swing the game as opposed to a situation such as the fifth inning with no runners on and two outs.
Having explained all of this, the only widespread argument against this challenge system is the one Max Scherzer made last week.
“Can we just play baseball?” he asked (via The Athletic). “We’re humans. Can we just be judged by humans? Do we really need to disrupt the game? I think humans are defined by humans.”
You’re still playing baseball, Max. As noted above, the “disruption” is about five seconds and would only happen a few times a game, if any (remember, no one is required to use the challenges). For me, it’s a small price to pay to get a pivotal ball/strike call correct.
To reiterate, I’m firmly against using ABS on every single ball/strike call. There are some who like to facetiously say something like, “bring on the robots!” after bad calls at big moments and I’ve done that as well, but it’s only a joke. I like the human element in general and jokes are good when we’re talking about an entertainment product. What is not a joke, however, is a human being making a mistake that will hang over his head for the rest of his life and will dramatically affect the outcome of a game. We have the technological ability to do something about it and that’s where the ABS system would be a win.
Let’s just give each team two or three challenges a game in the regular season and playoffs, starting in 2026. By 2027, it’ll just be an accepted part of the game that helps fix egregious errors by the human beings tasked with judging, with the naked eye, whether or not a roughly 2.9-inch-in-diameter sphere traveling well over 90 miles per hour clips a zone that is 17 inches wide.
Does that really sound so bad?
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