We’re only a week into this new season and nearly two months overall into the Automated Ball-Strike System and I’ve seen enough. It’s what we all thought it would be, y’all: ABS is a real and true game-changer for Major League Baseball. This is a pretty big benefit for the sport as a whole and something that should be here to stay for the future betterment of the game.
I’m not just saying that because the Atlanta Braves finally benefited greatly from it — we saw just how beneficial it was for the Kansas
City Royals when Salvador Perez spent most of Opening Day auditioning for a post-playing career as a home plate umpire with the way he was nailing challenges left-and-right.
Still, Thursday night’s game against the Diamondbacks was the clearest example yet of just how beneficial ABS will be for the sport going forward. Leading off the top of the fifth inning with the Braves up 2-1, Ozzie Albies had worked himself into a full count before seemingly getting rung up for strike three on a pitch that was quite clearly outside — a call that Ozzie challenged the exact second he heard the strike call from the ump.
I have no scientific data to back up the following claims but I think you’ll know what I’m talking about. You know — that particular type of ball-strike call from the home plate ump where it feels like the ump is getting one over on the batter for going to first base too quickly or doing the same thing for a pitcher for getting into his strikeout strut too early. Either way, it feels less like an accurate call and more like the umpire trying to exert undue influence on the game and it’s always frustrating every time you see it.
Ozzie Albies just delivered one of the clearest examples of how this will be beneficial to the game going forward. The call went Atlanta’s way, Ozzie Albies took a walk (which is always news in and of itself) and now the Braves had the leadoff man on instead of starting off the frame with an out.
As this article from FanGraphs on the 2020s Run Expectancy Matrix details, getting the leadoff man on base in any given inning is huge. While it may not be the difference between scoring eight runs like they did last night or simply scoring one run, just having the opportunity is massive when compared to the past when that opportunity would’ve had to go by the wayside just because you had to accept whatever the umpire decided behind the plate.
Now, teams have a say in the matter and missed calls like that have less of a chance of being the subtle game changers that they had been in the past. Now, I won’t say that it’s going to eradicate this type of thing — once teams run out of challenges, then they’re back at the mercy of whatever the umpire sees. The Red Sox can tell you all about that based on their experience with the infamous C.B. Bucknor last week.
Bucknor aside, umpiring at the big league level is incredibly difficult and expecting these folks to get every call correct is a largely impossible task. The fact that they routinely get calls correct in the high-90 percent range says less about how easy it is and more about how good the majority of umps are at doing their job. With that being said, ABS is a positive even for them since it’ll help get those numbers up even higher. The umpires get an extra set of automated eyes while the players, coaches and managerial staff get to have an actual and tangible say in the matter of balls and strikes rather than risking ejection each time they disagree with a call.
This might be a quick analysis/opinion article but there’s not a lot else to be said other than ABS is great. While the current data suggests that the Braves may not be the best at using the system to overturn calls in their favor (at least not yet) but for now, it really feels like the early data and the previous ideas of what ABS would be like in big league baseball are all confirming what we suspected: This system works, it’s good for the sport and hopefully it stays around for a very long time. Maybe it’ll need some slight tweaks if some glitches/exploits in the system come up but for now, the ABS era of baseball is off to a fantastic start.
