ABS is Here, Whether We Like it or Not

Batters, catchers and even pitchers got in on the action with mixed results.

Let’s talk about the first weekend of the ABS system!

Well, first, let’s meander about the weekend — and especially Mike Trout. He will come back up in the Automated Ball-Strike portion of the essay, but let’s start here by saying that Trout had a wonderful weekend — six hits (including a couple of bombs) and seven walks in 20 plate appearances. His current slash line is .462/.650/.1.573, which, you know, is pretty good.

I mean, no, it’s not Washington’s Joey Weimer, who is 6-for-6 with a triple, two homers, and two walks for the fairly striking 1.000/1.000/2.333 slash line. A 3.333 OPS? That would be a record!*

*The maximum OPS is 5.000, and it has been done seven times, most recently by Houston’s reliever Gustavo Chacîn in 2010, when he homered against Washington’s Luis Atilano in his only plate appearance of the season.

You could also argue that Chicago’s Munetaka Murakami is off to a hotter start — Murakami has homered in each of his first three games, and that’s very exciting because Murakami was a home run sensation in Japan. There were a lot of scouts who did not think that Murakami’s power would transfer to America, which might be how he ended up on the White Sox in the first place. The scouts could still be right, of course. But you’d have to say that early evidence points Murakami’s way.

Cleveland’s Chase Delauter smacked two home runs in his big-league debut, and he leads the league with four. Sal Stewart is having fun in Cincinnati; he has seven hits in his first three games, four of them extra-base hits. Christian Yelich has been locked in, hitting .600, and he hit a pinch-hit homer on Sunday as the Brewers came back from, like, a 48-run deficit to the White Sox. I don’t remember the actual score.

At the same time, Shohei is hitting .125, Judge is hitting .154, and over the weekend the Blue Jays acquired a 22-year-old infielder named Dub Gleed, which, in case it isn’t obvious, means that there’s a baseball player named DUB GLEED, and also you should know that Dub Gleed is from a place called American Fork, Utah, and, yes, I will immediately begin writing a limited series about Dub Gleed from American Fork, Utah. I have no choice.

But we were talking about Mike Trout.

On Opening Day, Trout hit one of the most perfect home runs I’ve ever seen.

The pitcher was AJ Blubaugh — whose name merits a minor role in my soon-to-be-written limited series “DUB GLEED: An American Fork Tale” — and threw a 96 mph fastball on the inside half the plate, and Trout turned on it, and while there have been many longer home runs (estimated 403 feet) and some harder-hit home runs (though 109-mph exit velocity ain’t too bad), this one was visual perfection. The balance. The crispness of the compact swing. The violence of it all. Flawless.

Of course, we all know that Trout — even with his wrecked body as he approaches his 35th birthday — is capable of such moments in isolation. His problem has been staying healthy enough to keep doing it. When the Angels announced that they were going to have Trout play center field every day, the already steep odds of him having his first healthy season in what’s approaching a decade seemed to only get steeper.

And, alas, those odds are still steep. All we Trout fans can do is hope.

But there is something fun we can take away from the first weekend of baseball.

Mike Trout LOVES the ABS challenge system.

In general, hitters have not done all that well with the ABS system so far … which is, you know, a bummer. The last thing the game needs is a new rule that will INCREASE strikeouts and REDUCE hits, but so far that’s exactly what the ABS system is doing. Here’s the rundown:

• 165 total challenges

• 78 by the batters — who were successful 42% of the time. They were able to flip 12 strikeouts and gain six walks.

• 97 by the defense (all but five by catchers), and they overturned SIXTY-ONE calls (63% success rate), flipping 20 strikeouts and overturning six walks.

Yikes. Sure, it’s one weekend, we’re still in March, let’s not jump to any panicked conclusions here. But batters hit .231 over the weekend, and the strikeout rate jumped to a terrifying 9.56 per nine innings. Sure, it's cold weather. Yes, pitchers start the year ahead of hitters.

And, of course, everyone — especially umpires — is still getting used to this whole ABS thing, and adjustments will be made. Adjustments MUST be made. Umpires will absolutely get better at calling balls and strikes because they have no choice; it’s humiliating having important ball-strike calls overturned, especially when you get SIX OF THEM overturned the way the annually maligned C.B. Bucknor did on Saturday. That’s unsustainable. You adapt, or you retire.

We can’t even begin to know the full impact of ABS yet.

But we do know this: Mike Trout loves the ABS system.

He challenged FOUR calls over the weekend. Four. That’s the most of any hitter. And you can see: He is getting a huge kick out of this. On a 1-0 count on Saturday, Bobby Abreu threw him a high pitch that was called a strike by home plate umpire Ben May. Trout challenged, got the ball call, and drew a walk.

On Sunday, in the ninth inning, he got TWO strike calls by home plate umpire Brennan Miller overturned. On the first pitch of that at-bat, Miller called a high pitch a strike — that was one that Astros catcher Christian Vasquez (a longtime pitch-framing maestro) pulled in for the call. Trout tapped his helmet and got it overturned.

Then, on a 3-1 count, Vazquez again brilliantly framed Abreu’s high pitch for a strike, Trout tapped the helmet again, and was given the walk.

That just felt SO satisfying. It was so great to watch an all-time great hitter completely turn around an at-bat because of his superior knowledge of the strike zone.

Trout wasn’t unerring over the weekend; he missed one strike call that caught the very top and very outside edge of the zone — I mean, maybe a millimeter of the ball was in the zone. But even that felt like a great challenge; the umpire had NO IDEA that was a strike; he just got lucky.

Here are the four pitches that Trout challenged, so you can see just how close that last one was:

I’m more convinced than ever that now, with the genie out of the bottle, the clock for a full-fledged ABS system — with every ball and strike called automatically — is close. Very close. The umpires are great at calling the vast majority of ball-strike calls because most are pretty obvious. But on the close ones? They’re just guessing. So far, 57% of all challenges have been successful, which is … awful for umpires.

As I say, I expect umpires to get better and for that number to come down, but it’s not at all clear what all this will do to the game. At least, for now, Mike Trout’s having fun.