Jayson Stark, writing for The Athletic back in March, examined the results of MLB’s Spring Training test of the Automated Ball Strike (ABS) Challenge System that’s coming next year (main link is paywalled, sorry; here are Apple News+ and Internet Archive links):

Stark spoke with players, managers, and team executives to get their take on the system. My main takeaway is that the system works… for some definition of “works”:

Every hitter, catcher and pitcher has an idea in his head of what a strike is and what a ball is. So for ABS to work — really work — the electronic strike zone has to feel essentially like the zone baseball players have in their heads.

You know what won’t work? If that zone feels just like some sort of technological creation.

So which was it this spring? Uh, let’s just say it’s a work in progress.

Tigers catcher Jake Rogers, on reviewing the ABS results after games:

“It’s crazy,” Rogers said, “because on ABS, you look at the iPad … and (the pitch is) half an inch below the zone. And then we get our report back with the old strike zone, and it’s a full ball in the zone. So it’s like, wow, it looks like a strike. It feels like a strike. And all of a sudden, you’re thinking: Do you challenge, or do you not challenge? So you go back and look at it, and it’s a ball (on ABS).”

Journeyman pitcher, Max Scherzer:

In his recent appearance on the Starkville podcast with me and Doug Glanville, Scherzer said one thing he’d like to see is “a buffer zone, maybe around the challenge system. So hey, if you challenge and it’s in the buffer, the call stands. So you keep human power, the human element, still with the umpire.

“I’m OK changing the call when it’s an egregious call,” the Blue Jays’ future Hall of Famer said. “But when we’re talking about a quarter of an inch that you can’t really detect it, I don’t necessarily know if that makes the game better.”

I agree with Scherzer. It’s great to have the system to correct clearly wrong calls. I’m less enthused about relying on it to make a call based on fractions of an inch—which no human could reliably distinguish in the best of circumstances anyway. If an umpire calls a pitch a ball, and was “wrong” by an eighth of an inch, that’s not a bad call. It’s a human call, and baseball is still a human game.

Stark asks, ”Are we sure this is what we want?”

Do we really want a World Series decided by a pitch that’s literally the width of a hair off the plate? I asked that question of an AL exec. He swatted it away like a piece of lint.

“Maybe just get the call right,” he said.

Stark closes:

What’s the true goal here? What are we trying to accomplish?

Technology is awesome. Robots are the future. And right calls are better than wrong calls. But is the sport truly better off if a World Series gets decided on a pitch 1-78th of an inch outside a robotized strike zone? The answers are so much harder than the questions.