ABS is Here-- Now What?

The 2026 baseball season is well underway.

And the old rumor has new life. Yes, they're moving first base one step closer to home plate, to eliminate all of the close calls.

Ok, it's an absurd joke, based on a belief that supreme accuracy can be obtained with one swift move. That's a fallacy of course. But things can be made better. Maybe this is the year.

Because we now have our first formal exposure to the Automated Ball- Strike system (ABS) in Major League Baseball. ABS has been used in the minor leagues for several years. And it was used in Spring baseball this year in order to prepare teams for its official implementation in the 2026 regular season.

The early results are positive. The challenges are infrequent, and they are well- accepted, at least publicly. . And perhaps most vital to the change, they are quick to play out.

Here's how it works. This system is in place to properly assess called balls or strikes– confirm the call or reverse it. Only the batter, the pitcher or the catcher can initiate a challenge, and he has but two seconds to do so. The signal to initiate a challenge is a tap on the top of the hat or batting helmet, and that tight time frame means there's no glancing over into the dugout to get input from the braintrust. That aspect of the system makes things happen quickly, and it also adds an element of intrigue, as to which players may have a green light to challenge --as well as how early in a given game players may be cleared to tap.

Each team gets only two challenges per game ( though a challenge is retained if it is upheld on review).

And what of that review?

Yes, it is a bit different than having a human ump makes the call. That's because the "robot" makes its depiction of the location of a pitch based on the mid- point of home plate , which is famously 17 inches wide . Ahhh, baseball , with its famously fluky dimensions, including a pitching rubber that is 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate, plus variable fence distances, wall heights and foul territory. The ball itself having a diameter of 2.9 inches. (these numbers make our English foot- pound system look downright logical).

So now the traditional definition of a called strike changes a bit. The forever formal definition was that a pitch is a strike if ANY part of the baseball touches ANY part of the three- dimensional box bordered by the irregular pentagon that is the plate AND given the vaguely defined upper and lower borders of the zone– which depend on the batter's body (plus or minus his crouch). Got all that? No wonder there are arguments!

Now, since the "robot" must base a three- dimensional space on a single point, and that point is the very center of the plate, pitches that cross that spot elsewhere will show as "missing" the strike zone.

And that strike zone is now defined at its upper and lower borders as the lines seen at 53.5% of a batter's height (top of the zone) to 23% of his height (bottom)

With the definition now being dependent on a player's height, we now need an official height for each player. The results of a MLB measurement frenzy have outed many hitters as quite a bit shorter than we previously had been led to believe.

Sam Blum ( The Athletic) recently reported that 225 of 450 players on Opening Day were measured to be shorter than they had been in 2024-5. (Oddly, 45 players became taller).

So it seems that shorter might be better if you're trying to compress a strike zone. Now paging the ghost of Eddie Gaedel, the small person ( 43 inches in height ) pinch- hitter signed by Bill Veeck back in 1951 for the St Louis Browns. Gaedel offered opposing pitchers a strike zone that was estimated at 1.5 inches when he was in his crouch, back when human umpires still ruled the day. Not surprisingly, he was walked on four straight pitches, all of them high.

Of course, these ABS changes are ok only as long as all involved agree to the ground rules . And they have, so far. Not that they have much of a choice. For there is inherent improvement in a system that lifts us from the approximate 15 year period in baseball in which the umpires were the only ones warching who did not have instant electronic evidence that the just- rendered call was incorrect. The most glaring example was back in 2010, when Tigers' pitcher Armando Galarraga was denied his perfect game on what should have been the game's final play. The 27th batter was mistakenly called safe at first base on a grounder, when he clearly was out. Many fans in the stands had easy confirmation of the mistake on their phones , but no replay or challenge was in place to help put things right.

Of course, that was not a ball/ strike call, and ABS doesn't yet extend beyond the pitch calls at home plate. So a better example might be the decisive Game 5 of the 1997 NLCS when the umpiring performance of the late Eric Gregg came under heavy criticism for calling strikes on pitches from Marlins'pitcher Livan Hernandez that appeared far outside to the Braves' lefty hitters. Hernandez struck out 15 batters that night, and a grainy video in a 2013 Fangraphs article by Jeff Sullivan seems to support the notion that Gregg's zone was off that night, for whatever reason.

ABS would have addressed thst issue by giving players some recourse when they believed a call had been missed. But beyond that, this example serves to demonstrate the value of setting things right when a call has been missed and there is instant evidence available to that effect.

An interesting earlier 2026 season compilation by Codify (@ CodifyBaseball) showed a wide range of "challenges per game" in the early going of 2026 , ranging from nine (!) in one game, all the way down to zero in 19 games. The most common numbers were in the category of two, three or four challenges in a game.

The nine- challenge game reminds us of another wrinkle the new rule provides- namely, it generates a report card of sorts for the umpires. Since you can only get to nine challenges if somebody misses at least five calls, that means accuracy was lacking in that game. And since these are balls and strikes we're talking about, the home plate ump is the man under scrutiny.

For many baseball fans, that's welcome news. Whether those report cards will have any effect on a given ump's job status remains to be seen. Their union is pretty stout.

We have seen a manager get tossed for arguing that a batter did not ask for the challenge quickly enough. And we had one batter earn a walk by successfully challenging two consecutive " strike three" calls.

Certainly there will be more adventures with ABS. But it seems an overall improvement, one that costs little time and causes little consternation.

Baseball as a sport is notoriously slow to make changes. Tradition often prevails over common sense, and technology is embraced slowly and reluctantly.

But here we have a small step in a better direction. Getting every call right is a goal that will never be reached. But this change takes advantage of available technology to get a bit closer to the Truth with a capital 'T'.

For that reason alone,ABS is the right call.

Patrick Conarro

RamblinSports