Introducing ABS Challenge Recaps

You voted for it, so here's the first official installment of daily ABS Challenge Recaps.

So because 92% of you voted for it — yikes! — I’m going to give you a very short ABS Challenge post every day for the next couple of weeks, and we can reevaluate from there. I’ll try to keep it lively and try to make it more about baseball and less about the ABS system itself. We’ll see how long we can keep this going.

First, I’d like to thank all of you — our BIG FAN event at The Strand in New York with Seth Meyers on May 18 is now completely sold out. True, I didn’t need the word “completely” in that sentence, but “completely sold out” just sounds cooler than regular old “sold out.” I am told that tickets in Boston (well, Cambridge), St. Louis, Kansas City, and Los Angeles are going fast. Come on out. We’d love to see you.

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The ABS Challenge Scorecard

• Total challenges: 343. Challenges have been successful 189 times (55%).

• Batter challenges have been successful 52% of the time.

• Fielder challenges (almost always catchers) have been successful 58% of the time.

Wednesday was a great day for challenges, particularly for the hitters. In all, there were 57 challenges, 34 successful for a 59% success rate.

I’ve marked the two worst calls in red. Unfortunately, they were both made by the same home plate umpire, Andy Fletcher, in the Royals-Twins game. Fletcher had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Fletcher called the red ball well inside the strike zone a ball; Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers immediately challenged it, and it was overturned for a strikeout of Salvy Perez.

The red ball outside of the strike zone was called a strike by Fletcher; the Twins’ Austin Martin challenged it, the call was overturned, and it ended up being a bases-loaded walk.

The Austin Martin walk was interesting. As my pal, Royals announcer Ryan Lefebvre, said during the broadcast, this was a break from baseball as we knew it. See, the Royals were leading 12-1 at the time. And often during out-of-hand games — especially on miserable days, and it was miserable in Kansas City on Wednesday night — umpires would expand the strike zone to move the game along. Few seemed to mind back then.

Well, those days are over now. Every pitch has to be called by the book, or it can and will be challenged, and ABS doesn’t care about the score or if it’s raining or if it’s a getaway day or if it’s 105 degrees.

There were ELEVEN challenges in this game, a new record, and most of them were by the Twins, who have become the most aggressive challenger in baseball. They challenged nine of Fletcher’s calls, overturning eight. The Twins still lost the game 13-9, but remember, they were down 12-1 at one point. With the challenge system, teams are more likely to fight on, I think, even in seemingly lost games.