Enjoying Baseball's Renaissance

Viewership is up, teams are settling in with the ABS System and we might have a path forward without a lockout.

Happy Thursday, everybody. I’m seeing the finish line on my next book SEASONS — there it is, just beyond the hill — but let’s take a few minutes this morning to give you an expanded ABS Challenge Scorecard and, for you Clubhouse members, a few things I’m hearing around baseball including, maybe, possibly, hopefully, conceivably some good news regarding the seemingly inevitable lockout at the end of the season.

Here we go!

The ABS Challenge Scorecard

• Total challenges: 1,082. Challenges have been successful 582 times (54%).

• Batter challenges have been successful 47% of the time.

• Fielder challenges (almost always catchers) have been successful 60% of the time.

For the second straight day, the overall challenge percentage was below 50% — I believe this was the first time that’s happened this season. I mean, challenges were still successful 47% of the time, so the closest calls still feel like a coin flip. But maybe umpires are settling in a little bit?

Here are all the challenges of the day. Purple are batter challenges, gold are catcher challenges (once again, there were no pitcher challenges; there have only been 21 pitcher challenges all year).

Let’s tell a little story behind five of the weirdest ones:

Challenge 1: Toronto’s Braydon Fisher on the mound, Milwaukee’s Joey Ortiz at the plate — the home plate umpire is Chris Guccione. This is the seventh inning, Toronto leads 1-0, and it’s the first pitch of the at-bat. Guccione calls it a strike. This is exaclty the sort of bad strike call that, in years past, would have been entirely overlooked or credited to catcher Brandon Valenzuela for excellent pitch-framing.

“You don’t see many calls like that,” the announcing crew said, but the truth is that we actually did see plenty of calls like that. If you watch the pitch, what I think will strike you is just how normal that call seemed. Catchers are REALLY good at making balls look like strikes.

Challenge 2: New York’s Clay Holmes is on the mound, the Dodgers’ Max Muncy is at the plate, and the count is 1-0. Edwin Moscoso is the home plate umpire, and this slider comes in and is an obvious strike — so obvious that Mets’ catcher Francisco Alvarez is shocked that it wasn’t called a strike. He catches the ball, begins to toss it back to Holmes, and then does a classic movie double-take when he doesn’t hear the strike call. He then challenges, and it’s overturned.

Challenge 3: This one is also from the Brewers-Blue Jays game; Chris Cuccione had a rough day. Dylan Cease is on the mound, Gary Sanchez is at the plate, and this thing isn’t even close to a strike. Sanchez immediately challenges, and the call is immediately overturned. No fuss. No muss.

Most of the challenges, of course, are very close — too close for the human eye to assess accurately. I do believe that Major League umpires are, almost without exception, the very best in the world at what they do. But they cannot compete with 12 Hawk-eye cameras that capture the 3D path of the pitch from every angle. Heck, sometimes they even miss obvious pitches, like this one.

Challenge 4: Here’s a fun one — this is from the Atlanta-Miami game, Andrew Nardi is pitching, and Ozzie Albies is at the plate. Your home plate umpire is Adam Beck. This is on an 0-0 count, Beck calls it a ball, and it’s OBVIOUSLY a ball — nobody should know this better than Marlins catcher Liam Hicks, who catches it and rather desperately jerks his glove back into the zone to try and steal a strike.

Nobody can believe it when Hicks then challenges the call.

“Oh come on!” the Braves announcer says, and that’s the right reaction. This is what you might call a frustration challenge — the Marlins had given up three runs in the inning and now trail 6-0. This is a fun part of the ABS system; you sometimes see catchers and batters let emotions get the better of them. There’s still humanity in our robo-ump world.

Challenge 5: This comes from the Pittsburgh-Washington game, Carmen Mlodzinski on the mound, Luis Garcia Jr. at the plate, 0-2 count. Umpire James Hoye calls it a ball, and Pittsburgh catcher Henry Davis tries desperately to steal strike three. But he makes two mistakes. First, his frame attempt was a bit sloppy — he pulled his glove upward and did not take into account that the pitch was both low and outside. It was a pretty easy ball call for Hoye. And then Davis sheepishly challenged it, knowing, I’m sure, that it was a ball. I’d call this more of a hope challenge than anything else.

OK, now I have a couple of thoughts I want to share with the Clubhouse about stuff I’m hearing. Come on down, the door’s open below.

And if you ever feel like joining us in The Clubhouse — not for more, exactly, but to be a bigger part of our world — we’d love to have you.