Last spring, I attended Major League Baseball Spring Training for the first time. What I also saw for the first time was the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System in action. 

Each team was allowed two challenges per game, with batters and pitchers permitted to challenge any pitch they wanted. If a batter felt that a called strike was a ball, they could challenge it, and vice versa. 

It was announced on Sept. 23 that the ABS Challenge System will be used full-time in the MLB in 2026, following its trial in Spring Training. Why is this important? At-bats, sometimes entire games are getting changed by human error among home plate umpires. 

In the three Wild Card round win-or-go-home games on Oct. 2, all three home plate umpires called balls and strikes at below league average rate, according to popular X account @UmpireAuditor. The three umpires missed a combined 36 calls, none as egregious as the full count pitch that was called strike three against San Diego Padres infielder Xander Bogaerts in the ninth inning of a series-deciding game. It was almost certainly ball four.

The Padres went on to lose 3-1, but things could have been a lot different had the correct ball four call been made. 

The aforementioned X account also claims that there were 26,567 missed ball/strike calls during the 2025 regular season. Yes, 26,567. Divide that by the number of teams in the league, 30, and that’s 885 missed calls per team this regular season.

In an article published by mlb.com, data from Spring Training says that 52.2% of challenges were successful. At that rate, during the 2025 regular season, the 26,567 missed calls would be trimmed down to 13,867. 

The challenges themselves don’t even prolong the game at all. Data from the same publication above claims that each challenge added an average of 13.8 seconds to a game. If each team uses both of their challenges in a game, this would add less than a minute to the time of game. 

The ABS Challenge System won’t overturn every incorrect call made by a home plate umpire, but it will be a great lifeline in tense, late-game situations when a call does not go the right way. I can see managers constantly telling their pitchers and hitters to save their challenges for these types of situations, because the managers themselves cannot initiate a challenge. 

As someone against robot umpires, the ABS Challenges System is a perfect happy medium between having no challenge system at all and going completely robotic. The reality is that calls are going to be missed. It happens in every sport. The ABS Challenge system will be a good way to cut down on those missed calls.