For Now, ABS Makes Good Theater

Even with all the testing data from the minor leagues and spring training, it was hard not to wonder how MLB’s new automated ball-strike challenge system would feel in big league games that count. When would teams use their challenges? Who would use them? How often? Might we see a hotheaded pitcher go rogue, burning his team’s precious challenge in a fit of rage? The potential entertainment value of ABS, though, was something I didn’t question. For one thing, it ends up being a rather tidy rule change. Unlike, say, basketball reviews that have refs clustered at the monitors for eons, an ABS challenge is resolved in something like 15 seconds max. (MLB’s study of the challenge system in spring training last year showed that it added only about a minute to the average game.) Tennis fans can also attest to the great spectacle that was the old Hawk-Eye challenge system, the crowd slow-clapping in unison as they waited for the animated tennis ball to streak across the rendering on the scoreboard and deliver the result. The slow clap hasn’t caught on yet in America’s ballparks, but the crowd is still having some fun with this new addition to the game. Under the ABS challenge system, a team begins each game with two challenges. If a player gets an umpire’s call overturned, their team retains the challenge. In effect, this means a team has unlimited challenges until they get two wrong. So a team on a challenging heater can really show up an umpire who’s off his game. C.B. Bucknor, one of MLB’s longest-tenured umps and one of its least accurate, found this out for himself behind home plate in the sixth inning of Saturday’s altogether weird Red Sox-Reds game, when Eugenio Suárez successfully challenged his way out of two would-be third strikes on back-to-back pitches.