Comerica Park, Detroit (The ball-strike challenge system is a welcome improvement - Too bad they got it wrong)

 

 

With the ABS (Automatic Ball and Strike) challenge system going into place this year, Major League Baseball has taken a huge step forward to make sure that the outcomes of games are decided by the actions of the players, rather than the umpires.

It’s too bad they did it wrong.

The ABS challenge system

The way the ABS challenge system works is that after every pitch where the umpire calls a ball or strike (i.e., every pitch on which the batter doesn’t swing), there is an opportunity for a challenge. But the challenge has to be made “immediately,” and can only be made by the batter, pitcher and catcher, by tapping their cap or helmet. In practice, I’ve seen few pitchers make challenges, so it’s really the batter or the catcher.

If there’s a challenge, a graphic shows up on the scoreboard, which shows the trajectory of the ball, and then shows where it is in the strike zone. An example is here, or a set of stills from the process is shown below (the image above is really the final image in the sequence). Most missed calls are like the one in the set of stills, either a fraction of the ball was in the strike zone (which makes it a strike) or the edge of the ball was a fraction of an inch out of the strike zone. Major league pitchers are very good at throwing the ball where they want to, and they are aiming to have just a tiny fraction of the ball go through the strike zone. 

A team can challenge as many pitches as they want until they've missed twice, then they can't challenge any more. In practice, teams tend to save the challenges for the late innings or crucial situations. 

Anything that makes a higher percentage of the outcomes depend on player performance than umpire performance is a plus.

The alternatives

The bad alternative is the old system, where the home plate umpire decided whether it was a ball or a strike, made the call, and the call stood. That meant that the strike zone definitely depended on the umpire, and sometimes on the umpire’s opinion of the pitcher or batter. I hated that.

The good alternative is a “robot umpire.” If the technology exists to check the challenge, that technology could be used to call the balls and strikes in the first place. In that case, you could just have a computer make the call and tell the umpire in time for the umpire to signal the call. Both ABS and robot umpires were being tested in AAA games for the first year and a half of our quest. They used one system (ABS or robot umpire) on weekdays, and the other on weekends (I can't remember which was used when by now).

While I think the challenge system is an improvement, I liked the robot umpire better. The technology was good enough that I never noticed a delay between the pitch and the call, or at least no more than the pause for dramatic effect that many umpires use. And I never saw any complaints about calls using either system.

How often do umpires miss ball/strike calls?

On every pitch on which the batter doesn’t swing, the umpire has to make a call. I took two somewhat random games this season to see how well the umpires do.

The two games were two consecutive games that I attended. One was a game in Indianapolis (AAA) on April 12, with Jen Pawol behind the plate calling balls and strikes. She is the only female to have umpired in the majors, but that was only as a replacement for a series last year. The next was a major league game in Phoenix on April 18, with Jim Wolf behind the plate. Wolf debuted in the majors in 1999, and has been in the majors full-time since 2004, more than 20 years. In the game in Indianapolis, there were seven challenges, and in five of those cases, Pawol’s calls were overturned. In the Phoenix game, there were no challenges. Does that mean that Pawol is not quite ready for the big time, or that Wolf was perfect? The numbers might surprise you.

The MLB app will show the pitch, relative to the strike zone, on every pitch (including those on which the batter swings). I went through those two games to see how well Pawol and Wolf did. There are two caveats here, although I don’t think they’re significant, for reasons I’ll explain. One caveat is that I was looking at the MLB app on a cell phone screen, so on those pitches where the edge of the ball was within a fraction of an inch of the edge of the strike zone, I tried to guess what the ABS system would have said, but I might have missed some. Out of the nearly 300 at-bats I looked at, though, there were only a few where I wasn’t sure. The more serious caveat is that I was doing this during a game (the Blue Jays got eight runs in the first inning of the April 19 game in Phoenix, so I needed something to keep me entertained). This might have caused me to lose count at some point, but if I did, I’d guess that it was in the larger number (the number of correct calls), rather than the smaller one.

Jim Wolf got 92 of 101 calls correct. That means he missed one call per inning, not quite 9% of the calls he made. Jen Pawol got 156 of 168 calls correct, before challenges. So she missed more calls (12 vs. 9), but she made 67 more calls. She actually missed slightly more than 7% of the calls, so she did better, before the challenges. 

Why did she have more challenges? I can only speculate. Jen Pawol is working in AAA. Sexism might play a role - perhaps Pawol got challenged more because she's a woman. But I’ve seen an Arizona Fall League game where her performance, according to the app, wasn’t nearly as good as in Indianapolis, but her calls were completely consistent with one another, and she never got a single challenge. Another possibility is that it's reputation. Jim Wolf is known as a good 20-year veteran umpire, so players may be less likely to challenge him.

After you take the challenges into account, there were nine wrong calls in Wolf’s game, and five in Pawol’s. I don’t see why we can’t use the robot umpire, and make that number zero.

Tonight, there were four challenges, three successful. After the game, I quickly went through the play-by-play on the MLB app, and there were five calls that were definitely wrong, and another three that were very close, but that I thought were wrong, so that would mean the home plate umpire missed 11 calls, between the number of the two games I looked into more deeply. 

The human factor 

One of the reasons for using the challenge system rather than just having all the ball-strike calls made by computer is a desire to retain “the human element.” The argument for “the human element” often brings up the ability of catchers to “frame” pitches, to convince an umpire that a pitch was a strike when it might really have been out of the strike zone (note that the link I mentioned only brings this up late in the article).

I really, really dislike this argument. I want the human element in baseball games to be the way the players perform. I don’t want it to be how easily an umpire can be fooled. I don’t want to get rid of umpires. They’re necessary to keep the game under control. They’re necessary to interpret the rules. They’re necessary to make the calls on the bases – I love the instant replay challenge system, but I don’t want to wait for a group of people to decide on safe/out and fair/foul calls, when human umpires are very, very good at that. There really aren’t many challenges to on-field calls in a game, and a significant fraction of those produce a situation where, after a few minutes of looking at different angles, the umpires making the ruling on the replay decide that they can’t figure it out, so the call on the field “stands”, as opposed to being “upheld” or  “overturned.” But a computerized system can do ball-strike as quickly as an umpire can make a call.

The other “human element” factor I’ve heard suggested, perhaps cynically, is that the challenge system involves the crowd in the game more. At Wrigley, we saw a challenge on a 3-2 pitch with two outs, the bases loaded, and a 90% full stadium -- the crowd was definitely engaged. And the end of last night's game was delayed by 15 or 20 seconds when a batter who had just been called out on strikes for the final out challenged the call. The pitch was indeed a strike, but at that stage, there's no reason to save a challenge, so it seemed like a good strategy. However, with the home team losing by seven runs, and most of the fans gone, it really didn't get much reaction. 

I’m all in favor of things that bring fans out to the ballpark, but if that’s the reason for ABS, I still don’t like it.

So I’m glad we’ve got a challenge system, but I wish we could have done it right.

The game: Boston Red Sox 4, Detroit Tigers 0

The Red Sox swept a three-game series in Detroit. Given that Detroit had the better record coming in, that's surprising. Given that the Tigers may have been shaken by the news that ace pitcher Tarik Skubal is going to have elbow surgery, maybe they were just down. But the Tigers did not play well. 

The Red Sox got two runs in an inning where there were two plays, a hard hit ground ball to the third baseman and a foul pop fly near the first base dugout, that Kerry and I (and many of the crowd) though could have been caught with a good play, but were not. Neither was charged an error, but good defense would have prevented one or both runs. The, a couple of innings later, the Red Sox had two runners on and two out, and a ground ball went through the third baseman's legs for an error, and both runners scored. That was the four runs for the game. The closest the Tigers came to scoring was when they loaded the bases with two outs in the second inning (before the Red Sox had scored), but Red Sox right fielder Willyer Abreu made a great running, sliding catch of a short fly ball to end the inning. In other words, the Red Sox made a great defensive play in a crucial spot, and the Tigers failed to catch balls in a couple of crucial spots. Defense does make a difference.

The problem with third base

Two different Detroit third basemen have made crucial errors at crucial spots in the last two nights. Last night's game ended up 10-3, so it's hard to say that a single play made the difference, but a two-out  error in the first inning by third baseman Zach McKinstry was followed by a three-run home run that started the rout. Tonight, Colt Keith, failed to make a play in the first inning when Boston scored, and then made an error that allowed their other runs to score. So it sounds like Detroit needs to find someone who can play third base.

Third base is a tough position to play. You're playing a little more than 90 feet from someone who hits a ball at you at 100 mph, so it takes good reflexes. In my recreation league slo-pitch softball days, I found myself playing third base a lot, because I could make the throw across the diamond accurately, but I didn't have good reflexes, so I always had bruised shins if I was a regular third baseman. In other words, I sympathize. But these guys are major leaguers, not rec league players.    

It's a joy to watch a great third baseman play -- Brooks Robinson and the young Nolan Arenado come to mind as players who did it extremely well for years, and there are plenty of others who make slick plays. On the other hand, you see some butchers at third. 

The year we first had season tickets to the Diamondbacks, a rookie named Mark Reynolds came up in the middle of the season and took over the third base job. He was the regular for the next three seasons before being traded, and ended up playing for 13 seasons with eight different teams. Clearly, he had to be doing something right, and that something was that he could often hit the ball a long, long ways. In his three full seasons with the Diamondbacks, he hit a total of more than 100 home runs. On the other hand, he struck out a lot, too -- he led the league in strikeouts (known in the scorebook as "K"s) each of his three full seasons with the Diamondbacks, including setting a new MLB season record. He also made a lot of errors ("E"s), leading the league in errors his first two seasons. He had the reflexes of a third baseman, but didn't always made the easy plays. It could be frustrating to watch, but I will always remember a Sports Illustrated description of his style of play: "That's Mark with a K, Reynolds with an E."