It’s 2026, which means baseball is partially governed by robots. More precisely, the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system is in place with the challenge system. Lots of ink, including our own, has been spilled on the new system; personally, I’m a fan of this intermediate step between letting CB Bucknor do whatever he wants and replacing umpires entirely. ABS also adds a small layer of strategy on when to use a challenge or when to save it.
Today, I want to see how well the Tigers are doing with their
challenges. BaseballSavant helpfully keeps a leaderboard for each team’s challenge metrics. I’ll be breaking those down here and examining where Detroit stands out, where they don’t, and why some of these metrics really don’t matter that much. These statistics are all based upon a league-wide “expected” challenge formula developed by Tom Tango. You can read more about it here, but put simply, by evaluating the distance from the edge of the plate, how much is left of the game, and how many challenges a team has remaining, Tango developed a method to determine how likely any pitch is to be challenged. This results in “net overturns more than expected” for four basic scenarios: the offense and defense when Detroit is batting, and the offense and defense when Detroit is pitching.
Offensive Challenges
Offensively speaking, the two categories of note are “net overturns more than expected for” and “net overturns more than expected against”. “For” is the category for when a Tiger batter initiates the challenge, while “against” means the opposing team’s pitcher or catcher initiated.
When trying to determine how good the Tigers are at challenging, it of course makes more sense to look at the “net for” category. There’s nothing they can do about “net against”; the umpire called a ball and the catcher, or occasionally the pitcher, said no. Short of swinging at it anyways, Detroit has no way to prevent that. Their 1.3 “net against” challenges ranks 18th in baseball, but really, it speaks to Padres’ catchers not getting the call on 2 pitches in the zone. Only one of their “net against” challenges got overturned into a strikeout, which is good. Hitters really shouldn’t be swinging at pitches that could have been challenged unless there’s 2 strikes.
Far more interesting to me is the “net for” category; this is what Detroit can control. These are pitches called strikes and Tigers’ batters requested review. Here they rate much more positively: 2.3 net overturns more than expected, 9th in the league. Detroit’s mostly succeeding here by challenging pitches very close to the zone and getting them right, which has outweighed some decently large misses. The picture below shows all 9 of Detroit’s offensive challenges so far. The green circles are challenges they won and got overturned, while they lost the gray ones.
The highlight here is Kerry Carpenter challenging that really close green one with 2 strikes, which flipped a strikeout on a pitch that was listed as “less than 0.1 inches” off the plate. Carpenter capitalized by walking on the next pitch, which must have felt good. Unfortunately, he didn’t end up scoring, which would have been the best outcome, but it’s still best practice to flip a strikeout the other way whenever possible.
My main takeaway here is Detroit probably stands to benefit from challenging a little more. They seem to be saving challenges for leverage situations, which is smart, but are probably leaving some obvious overturns on the table to try and save them for bigger opportunities later. If you combine their “net for” and “net against” scores, the Tigers’ hitters rank 15th in baseball. They aren’t taking many more chances than the median team, nor are they succeeding too much more than the median team.
Defensive Challenges
The exact same scenarios play out for defensive challenges, but in reverse. “Net overturns for” are when the Tigers are pitching and their catchers call for a challenge, while “net overturns against” means an opposing batter initiated the challenge.
The “net against” category means a little more here than with the hitters since how a catcher frames the pitch can fool both the umpire and the batter. The Tigers are 12th here at 0.1 “net overturns against more than average”. Basically, opposing hitters aren’t doing anything unexpected with their challenges versus Detroit. Interestingly, all four challenge attempts have come with Jake Rogers behind the plate.
“Net overturns for” is where Detroit – and really, Dillon Dingler – stands out. The team as a whole is 4/4 on defensive challenges; only the New York Yankees match their 100% success rate. Again, only having four defensive challenges is probably too few (it’s less than 1 per game), but hitting on all four is impressive. Furthermore, only 1 has been a gimme. That was Rogers against the Diamondbacks, and it stands out in the picture below. The other three on the edges were all Dingler.
Those three calls are certainly not gimme challenges. Considering how much a catcher has on his plate with pitch calling, the pitch com, and managing base runners, knowing the corner of a pitch’s trajectory clipped the zone on its way through is very impressive. The most impactful was a corrected strikeout on Fernando Tatis Jr on the pitch closest to the edge of those four.
Basically, add this to a list of things Dingler does very, very well, at least early in the season. A year after earning the AL Gold Glove as a catcher, Dingler’s already showing a new dimension to his defensive capabilities. Presumably his two years of experience with ABS in Toledo give him a leg up on most of his veteran MLB peers, and his overall framing skills handle the rest. So far, he’s rated at having saved the Tigers 0.8 runs in challenges through 7 games, third most in the league. Additionally, with Dingler leading the charge, the Tigers’ defense rates 4th with 3.8 total overturns above average. This really is a team built on pitching and defense.
On the whole, Detroit is 6th in all of baseball with 4.9 total overturns above average. The majority of that value comes from their exceptional catchers, while the offense is mostly just holding serve. The only way to improve would likely be challenging less conservatively in general, as both halves of the team are at an above-average success rate. Similarly to baserunning, risking a few bad calls is likely the price of correctly challenging a whole let more. Teams are surely still experimenting with the best challenge strategies, and we have little idea yet how sticky a skill this will turn out to be for catchers and hitters, but a more aggressive approach that doesn’t quite breach into recklessness seems like the right path.
