19-05-2025
MLB seems ready for automated balls and strikes. Players remain skeptical.
ARLINGTON, TEXAS - MAY 18: Joe Espada #19 of the Houston Astros argues a call with home plate umpire Nick Mahrley #48 in the third inning of a baseball game against the Texas Rangers at Globe Life Field on May 18, 2025 in Arlington, Texas. (Photo by)
This spring, Major League Baseball tested an automated balls and strikes challenge system in spring training games, allowing hitters, pitchers and catchers to challenge ball or strike calls they thought the home plate umpire missed. After years spent vetting the concept and testing its logistics in the minor leagues, the decision to subject the system to its harshest and most skeptical critics - major league players - signaled MLB's intentions: Automated balls and strikes (ABS) are coming to the big leagues, sooner or later. The questions are when, and in what form.
But two months after what MLB considered a largely successful test, the answers to those questions are still not clear, particularly in the minds of players. Conversations with players around the sport, as well as with MLB Players Association leadership, revealed a willingness to consider a version of the ABS system, but also widespread concerns about the timing and how a computer-determined strike zone might affect nuances of the game.
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'This is everyone's careers. There's a lot at stake. You don't want to influence that at all,' Cleveland Guardians catcher Austin Hedges said. 'But the idea of it, if it can be perfected - or at least, 99 percent - I think it could be good.'
Importantly, the process by which MLB implements rule changes such as this one - or, for example, the pitch clock implemented ahead of the 2023 season - does not necessarily require the players to agree completely. And though MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred suggested to the Athletic that the implementation of ABS could depend on whether the change becomes part of collective bargaining negotiations after next season, procedure certainly allows the sport to move sooner.
The process for rule changes looks like this: One side, normally MLB, must make a proposal to the competition committee, an 11-member group consisting of six MLB representatives, four players and one umpire. While the MLBPA did agree to the setup of that committee in its last round of collective bargaining with club owners, it leaves players with little actual power: Proposals are submitted to a vote, and MLB will always have more votes.
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As of this week, no such proposal had been brought before the competition committee to be considered for implementation in 2026, though people familiar with the process say those conversations usually happen later in the season.
When they do, players and their representatives at the MLBPA say they will have concerns, most of them centering on the dimensions and fairness of an ABS strike zone vs. the one they are used to; the potential to try to manipulate that system with unsavory tactics; the need for an adequate adjustment period; and the removal of the human element from a sport with which it is so intertwined.
'I'd prefer to be punched out by a human,' said Washington Nationals first baseman Nathaniel Lowe, lending voice to the last of those arguments. 'Human error is forever and always a part of the game. There's an error column. If I hit every pitch I swung at, I'd be a lot better. If pitchers made every pitch they tried to execute, we'd never get a hit. So I think the human error should stay forever.'
Toronto Blue Jays starter Max Scherzer, a former MLBPA Executive Board member and relentless skeptic of MLB's rule changes over the years, outlined a more pragmatic concern about eliminating human input: Part of being a veteran pitcher is knowing which pitches an umpire is giving, and establishing command throughout a game (or even a career) so that umpires give close pitches the benefit of the doubt. If a call that went one way all night can suddenly be challenged by a hitter and flipped with the game on the line, it renders those efforts moot.
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But for Scherzer, like many of his colleagues, concerns about rule changes often center on the potential for MLB's manipulation of the game through increased control of the rules.
This month, for example, the Athletic reported that MLB altered the way umpires are graded by shrinking their margin for error around the zone from two inches to three-quarters of an inch, a decision players say has resulted in a tighter strike zone.
MLB officials insist the change was made to make umpires more accurate in keeping with long-standing player and club pleas for increased umpire accountability. Player skeptics see MLB pushing a smaller zone and wonder whether the shift is meant to help hitters catch up in a pitching-heavy era.
Either way, players' concerns with that shift mirror concerns voiced about an ABS system: The more MLB controls the strike zone, the more it could influence the way the game is played.
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'There's a lack of trust and a lack of communication,' San Francisco Giants starter Justin Verlander told the San Jose Mercury News about the shift this week. 'They do everything behind closed doors and don't include us in anything - in the game that we play and make our livelihood doing.'
In fairness to MLB, when it comes to ABS, league officials have admitted that finding a way to ensure the system adheres to a fair and consistent strike zone has required years of experimentation. In the early years of testing in the Atlantic League, for example, players often felt pitches were being called too far in front of the plate or too far back, missing late movement or holding players accountable for movement that happened when the pitch was nearly past them.
And after years of trying to determine how to ensure a zone would be fair to hitters of all sizes and stances, but also immune to inevitable attempts to manipulate it, MLB decided to test an automated zone that was the width of home plate, that would call pitches when they were exactly halfway from the front of home plate to the back, and that was set based on players' heights. In other words, no matter how much a player hunched or craned, his zone would remain the same for ABS purposes.
But the result was a zone many players felt was inconsistent and unpredictable. Hedges, for example - a veteran catcher with a reputation as one of the most talented and astute defenders in the game - said he could never get a feel for what was a strike and a ball from pitch to pitch.
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'I didn't feel like I had any idea where the zone was on any specific player. Pitches that felt like strikes or felt like balls were close in a way where I couldn't figure out where it was,' Hedges said. 'That was my main issue with it.'
Indeed, multiple players said they felt the zone in spring training games they played with ABS testing was different from games without it.
'It definitely feels like it was tighter [with ABS],' said Nationals outfielder Dylan Crews, who played in Class AAA when the system was being tested there last year. 'I would say it felt a little different.'
Competing with a different strike zone, players say, will require more of an adjustment period than other rule changes MLB implemented in recent years. The pitch clock, for example, was implemented after one spring training of practice with it. ABS will need more, in large part because the system was not in every spring training facility, so many veterans barely got to test it at all.
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'I think I had it for one outing and two innings. It wasn't until [Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder] Andrew McCutchen tapped his helmet [to challenge a call] that I knew it was happening at all,' veteran Baltimore Orioles starter Zach Eflin said. 'But I think there could be room for it. Sometimes these games are dependent on a called strike or a called ball, and that influences the game.'
Kevin Slowey, the managing director of player services for the MLBPA, said the union is in touch with MLB about finding a way for players to look back at their regular season starts or at-bats and see which pitches would change with the new ABS zone to help build familiarity outside spring training games.
And while Manfred also suggested umpires would rather give up calling balls and strikes completely than be subject to public correction within an ABS system, the umpires' union agreed to a challenge system of some sort in its most recent collective bargaining agreement with MLB this winter. An attempt to reach the umpires' union for comment was not successful.
Interestingly, given the always fraught relationship between MLB and its players' union, the one concern players and the MLBPA dismissed entirely was the idea that MLB is using the challenge system as a Trojan Horse to force fully automated balls and strikes on the sport in the future. All parties seem to trust MLB when it says feedback from fans and players alike has suggested the idea of fully automated balls and strikes is deeply unpopular, so that as of now, owners would have no reason to push for it.
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So while some catchers have expressed concerns over pitch framing becoming a less coveted skill in a game where there are no human eyes to fool, it seems framing would remain important on all but a few calls a game in the current vision for the system.
'At least with the challenge system, it still brings value in receiving. I picture with a good receiving catcher, a hitter might not challenge a close pitch because it looks like a strike,' Hedges mused. 'But then the problem is, you're going to have catchers catching poorly on purpose. And I hate that. That is what's going to happen, and I know that because I would do that.'
To the extent that there is ever consensus among players, Hedges's warning summed it up well: The challenge system could bring value, sure. But it could also yield unanticipated consequences, and no player wants to be navigating them with wins, losses and livelihoods on the line.
For its part, MLB believes it has vetted and honed automated balls and strikes slowly and carefully, and MLB officials see the current iteration as one that addresses years of concerns from players and fans. Testing the system on big leaguers this spring made clear they think it is nearly ready. What remains to be seen is when players will agree and how long MLB is willing to wait.
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