PHILADELPHIA — In the 1992 movie Mr. Baseball, aging slugger Jack Elliot (portrayed by Tom Selleck) lived by a simple mantra: “Baseball is a game. And games are supposed to be fun.”
On the big screen, that belief ultimately helped the fictional Elliot overcome his own bad habits and imperfections.
Twenty-four years later in real life, it is one reason that big leaguers like Toronto Blue Jays ace Dylan Cease appreciate the first season of MLB’s Automated Ball-Strike challenge system.
“I think it’s entertaining,” Cease said at Tuesday’s MLB All-Star Game press conference. “I like it when it goes my way, and I don’t like it when it doesn’t. I think it’s entertaining, and it’s just one of those where I’ve kind of just accepted it is what it is, and I thought it’s been kind of nice.”
At the unofficial halfway mark of the first season of ABS implementation, Cease’s sentiments were echoed by most players attending the Summer Classic.
It wasn’t just that they appreciated what the system added in terms of correcting mistakes. They also acknowledged the new competitive wrinkles it added that perhaps hadn’t been appreciated beforehand.
For starters, each team’s two incorrect challenges per game have become precious commodities. Lose them and your team is at a decided disadvantage.
That happens more often than you might think. There has been an average of roughly 4.2 challenges per game through the season’s first half, and only 53.3% of those have been successful.
“You can really see a difference when you’re out of challenges,” Los Angeles Angels slugger Mike Trout said. “It changes the whole game. We talk about it all the time. When we lose challenges in the game, it’s a game-changer.”
The system has also supported the idea that catchers have the best view for determining the strike zone, succeeding at 58.7% of their challenges, while batters have succeeded 47.8% of the time and pitchers only 36.6% of the time.
That intuitively makes sense given each player’s point of view. But it can sometimes require emotional management when a pitcher believes he caught the zone only for a catcher to keep the challenge in his pocket.
“It’s just something at the end of the day, it just goes back to the trust that pitchers put in their catchers,” Athletics catcher Shea Langeliers said. “They know that we’re there for them at the end of the day. We want them to be successful.”
Meanwhile, the fears among some umpires that the new technology would stain their profession simply haven’t materialized.
Only two men in the blue — CB Bucknor and Andy Fletcher — have seen more than two-thirds of their challenged calls overturned. And Bucknor has been sidelined with health issues since the very early part of the season.
“They want to do as good as possible, too,” Langeliers said. “In my personal experiences, the umpires have been really good (with it).”
The system isn’t perfect. Perhaps its largest unintended impact has been changing the entire concept of the strike zone. Once defined in part by where a batter stands in the box, it now depends only on the location of home plate and the batter’s pre-measured dimensions.
That can lead to some odd situations, where a pitch catches the back or front corner of the plate but would’ve been a ball when it crosses the hitter’s plane. But that might be a relatively small price to pay for getting the big calls right most of the time, said Blue Jays and American League manager John Schneider after he raised exactly that point.
“That’s me nitpicking,” Schneider confessed. “I think that it’s done what it was intended to do so far. And I’m sure there’ll be tweaks along the way, like anything in the league.”
