When will MLB go 'full ABS,' let robot umps take over? Maybe never

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But it is a question the league has no interest in answering yet. “We’re just too early in the process for me to even think about any change to the system right now,” commissioner Rob Manfred said on the Dan Patrick Show earlier this month. “I think we’re pretty satisfied with where we are.” It may be early. The technology may not be as microscopically perfect as it looks. But once again, as it did with the pitch clock, this sport has hit a rare trifecta with ABS. It’s fun. The strategy is enticingly second-guessable. And it’s game-changing. So why would any commissioner want to mess with that? Not just now, but ever? Well, there might be one reason: Because in time, said an executive of one National League team, “the newness wears off.” And when it does, he said, this will become a very different decision. That time could be months or years away. But when the novelty is no longer driving the appeal of Robots On Demand, that exec believes, MLB will have a fundamental question to answer: Is baseball better or worse with “full ABS,” if it unleashes those robot umps to get every call of every game “right”? That’s a question this league has tackled before. What it learned in that process provides an important lesson in how to implement change in any sport. But are those old lessons a precursor to what might happen in the future? You never know. So would baseball be a better sport if it went big tech — all robots all the time? We’ve spent the last two weeks digging into that question. Here are some of the factors that would go into that decision. Has it occurred to you yet how much ABS is transforming this sport? With one tap on the noggin, strikeouts can turn into walks. Walks can turn into strikeouts. Dead rallies can spring back to life. Even when a 1-2 count turns into a 2-1 count, that flip in baseball math can turn the leverage of a whole at-bat upside-down. So is it a surprise that we’ve already seen more than 1,000 taps on those caps and helmets? In the first three weeks of this season, there were 1,082 ABS challenges of ball/strike calls that used to be a job for humans alone. If this keeps up, we’re heading for nearly 10,000 challenges … and more than 5,000 calls overturned by the time this season is over. That’s about 200 counts that will get flipped every week. Innings change on those flips. Games change. Whole seasons could have a different narrative, all because one high-impact strike turned into a ball — or vice versa. But … if this sport ever went to full-time robot-ump mode, those numbers would shift dramatically. Do we really want ABS to tell us whether 700,000 pitches a year are balls and strikes? That’s a momentous question because it would be such a momentous change. “You should only make changes if it makes the game better,” former Cubs/Red Sox/MLB rules visionary Theo Epstein said, as far back as 2023, in an appearance on the Starkville podcast with me and my co-host, Doug Glanville. “You have to figure out exactly what you’re solving for. With ABS, you don’t want to force a solution without a problem.” So how did MLB figure out what it was solving for? This is the perfect time to look back at … What a time to be alive. It’s now technologically possible (theoretically) to play games in which every strike is a strike, every ball is a ball and 100 percent of all pitches are called “correctly.” So in 2023 and half of 2024, MLB conducted an experiment. It helpfully gave all the citizens of Triple-A baseball a chance to experience life on that all-robot planet. And just as most expected … Nobody wanted to live in a world like that. When you think about that, it’s almost hilarious. We could get every call right — but nah, let’s not? You might think that defies all logic. Now let’s explain why it actually makes sense. Because life in Triple-A affiliates such as Rochester and Albuquerque is so different from life in the big leagues, baseball was able to test both versions of ABS. That test changed everything. One version of that test involved challenges and robot cartoons rolling on the video board, almost exactly the way they do in the majors now. In Triple A, they played games using that challenge system three days a week. The other version unleashed the robots to call every darned pitch. They used that format on the other three days of the minor-league week. This went on for a season and a half. Along the way, the survey-takers from MLB asked players, managers, coaches and fans what they thought. At first, those survey-takers could hardly believe what they were hearing and seeing. Check out the results from this survey, conducted in August 2024. Players and coaches were asked: Which ABS format do you prefer? You might want to look away because “full ABS” is about to take a hellacious drubbing. Challenge system — 54 percent Full ABS — 8 percent Human umps — 38 percent (Source: Major League Baseball) Eight percent? They were being offered a chance to get every call right, and not even one in 10 wanted that? I think they were trying to tell us something. Fans in Triple A weren’t quite that vociferous. But it was still more than a 2-to-1 runaway win for the challenge system over full ABS. Challenge system — 47 percent Full ABS — 23 percent Human umps 30 percent (Source: Major League Baseball) To MLB’s credit, it listened. It pulled the plug on the “full ABS” portion of the experiment halfway through the 2024 season. It took the 2025 minor-league season to iron out a few more glitches in the challenge system. Then it brought that Robots On Demand challenge model to the big leagues in 2026. This is how change ought to work. Give the people what they want. That actually happened here. The commissioner has said repeatedly that the reason we’re seeing this system is because it is what players wanted. “Where we are on ABS has been fundamentally influenced by player input,” Manfred said last summer during a Q&A with members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. “If two years ago, you had said to me, ‘What did the owners want to do?’ I think they would have called every pitch with ABS as soon as possible. And that’s because there is a fundamental — a very fundamental — interest in getting it right.” But then they all learned that players and coaches hated life in that get-them-all-right alternate universe. So the league pivoted. But what was it about full ABS that all those players and coaches hated so much? And what about the challenge system did they prefer? For 149 seasons, MLB was the most human-friendly sport ever invented. It was a game played by humans, umpired by humans and happy to sell hot dogs, pizza and bubbly beverages to any human who stopped by. And then … the robots showed up. But at least they’re popping out there just a few times a night, by cap-tapping invitation only. In Korea, the KBO is using ABS on every pitch these days. And not to question the wisdom of anything the KBO does, but on our side of the Pacific, you know the biggest lesson we learned when those Triple-A leagues turned over the whole shebang to ABS? Humans do not think humans are overrated. Take it from Morgan Ensberg, manager of the Rays’ Triple-A Durham team. He lived through more than 100 games of the full-robot experience. He described those games as having “no color, no spirit.” “It’s just weird, man,” said Ensberg, a longtime challenge-system fan. “Like, a robotic voice is saying, strike or ball, and you’re going to have problems with that, because you kind of want humans. You know, we all have our brains. And you want to have humans hitting, and humans pitching, and humans calling the games, because we’re going to see things more similarly.” All it took was the invasion of the robots to make humans appreciate the work of human umpires more than ever. This might come as a revelation to the CB Bucknor Fan Club, but many recognize that umpires have a larger, more impactful presence than some give them credit for. Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo was one of the few people we spoke with who said he’d be open to the idea of full ABS someday. But the next thing we knew, he was getting all nostalgic about what we’d be losing if that ever happens. “What I would miss,” Lovullo said, “is the umpire/manager, umpire/catcher, umpire/pitcher/batter relationship. I don’t think that needs to go away. I think you have umpires that are loaded with personality, and it’s good for the game.” Imagine the absurdity of going to full ABS but forcing the home-plate umps to stand there all night behind the catcher even though computers are calling every pitch. Might as well just give them a comfy deck chair to lounge in until there’s a play at the plate. Also: Better hope the ABS computers don’t crash. “You can’t have full ABS and still tell umpires they have to be locked in on the strike zone,” said one of the half-dozen baseball executives who told us how opposed they are to the full-robot version. “If there’s an issue, what happens if you can’t reboot the system? You’re going to ask an umpire who hasn’t called a ball or strike in three months to start calling the pitches in the eighth inning of a playoff game?” Does anyone want that? Based on the experience of the people who have lived it — no: Full robot-ball was no fun. So you think that’s a ridiculous question, huh? You’re thinking a strike should always be a strike, a ball should always be a ball, and the strike zone should always be the strike zone. You’ll never believe who doesn’t think that: Baseball players. Oh, they want The Big Call to be 100 percent right. That infamous final pitch of Team USA versus the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic last month? They’d challenge that call 1,000 times out of 1,000. But do they want those non-human robots calling their inflexible, pre-programmed technological strike zone when it’s a 14-3 game in the eighth inning and there’s a 100 percent chance of heavy rain in the next 17 minutes? Oh, no. They definitely do not. In games like that, Arizona Diamondbacks catcher James McCann said, “of course you want every strike to be a strike. But there’s also an understanding of, OK, we need to get this game moving.” Well, you know who doesn’t give two gigabytes about the score or the precipitation probability? That robot ump, who doesn’t know a forecast from a four-bagger. All it knows is how to do the not-necessarily-human-friendly stuff it was programmed to do. So when players say they hate ABS, what they hate most is that those robots have none of the feel that human umpires have for every situation, every moment. A couple of years ago, then-Rangers pitching prospect Owen White shook his head and told us that it makes him antsy when ABS rewards him for pitches that even he thinks should not be a strike. “Like, backed-up sliders, where the catcher sets up on the outer third (of the plate) and then he catches them on the inner third?” White said. “To me, whenever you make the catcher look bad, those really shouldn’t be a guaranteed strike. But the ABS calls them strikes.” When even the pitchers feel like they should be arguing against their own called strikes, does that sound like the kind of rich human experience we get every time we walk into a ballpark? “That,” Ensberg said, “would be a terrible brand of baseball. Nobody would show up for that.” “You have to have a catcher,” Casey Stengel once said, “because if you don’t, you’re likely to have a lot of passed balls.” Well, if old Casey thought catchers were important then, he ought to watch baseball now. Who means more to any team than its catcher? In modern, 2026-style baseball, every catcher’s leisurely day includes: watching about seven hours of video … taking a dozen foul balls off the foot, mask and every finger … guiding five pitchers through a game … framing 150 pitches a night … catching dudes who throw nine different unhittable pitches … and now, calibrating when to challenge that sweeper that might have been a thousandth of an inch off the plate. Hmmm, seems like we need those guys. But you know who doesn’t respect any of that? That impersonal little robot ump, who just goes about its cold, silent, robot-ump business, calling whatever it was programmed to call. So rude. And that explains why, when we texted a bunch of executives to see where they stood on full ABS, one of them pounded his answer back so fast, he might need stitches in both thumbs. “I am very against going to full ABS,” he said. “I think it would be really bad for the game to essentially eliminate the catcher position, which is what I think will happen.” For 100 years, catchers have caught every pitch as stylishly as humanly possible, in their never-ending attempt to convince umpires that they’re all strikes. But guess who isn’t convincible? Mr. Robot, naturally. So if we let computers call every pitch, the actual catching part of catching would be so devalued, the same exec said, that teams might as well stick Giancarlo Stanton back there. Once the catching position “basically becomes a second DH spot,” he said, we’d be looking at “a massive change to our sport that I wouldn’t embrace.” Think of all the catchers who have spent a lifetime honing their catching/framing skills. Think of the teams that just drafted a catcher in a high round because of those same catching/framing skills. It’s hard to envision a world where the league says to those people: “Hey, it was cool you could do that stuff, but never mind. Now go learn to hit 60 homers or something.” Do we honestly believe that’s going to happen? We didn’t find anybody, in any part of the game, who was all in on that. But let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that the league found a way past that issue. Don’t we still have to ask: With full ABS … Once, the architects of ABS dreamed that they could somehow create an ABS strike zone that would make this game even more beautiful. Maybe it could put a dent in the strikeout rate. Maybe it could chip away at the walk rate. Maybe it could inspire more swinging, less missing and more balls in play. Oh, well. Cool theory. But boy, did that not happen. Take a look at what did happen to the walk rate in Triple A in 2023 and ’24. 2023 (Full ABS) — 12.30 percent 2023 (Challenge) — 10.45 percent 2024 (Full ABS) — 11.78 percent 2024 (Challenge) — 11.01 percent The league was tinkering with the strike zone in both of those seasons, so those numbers aren’t an exact barometer of what would happen in the big leagues. Nevertheless, the big-league walk rate in those seasons was only 8.6 percent in 2023 and 8.2 percent in 2024. We’re thinking a 40-percent spike in that rate wouldn’t be what anybody has in mind. At least the strikeout rate was slightly lower with full ABS. But does this sound like a more entertaining product to you? • More walks — and probably many more walks. • Minimal impact on the strikeout epidemic. • Longer games because robot umps forgot to attend Move the Game Along School. “That,” said one exec, “is not the best version of our game for anybody.” Have you ever asked yourself: What in the world is MLB really trying to accomplish by unleashing ABS on its sport? The easy answer is: To get every call right. The actual answer is: Not that. The truth is: The philosophy here is so similar to what the sport was trying to pull off with replay over the last decade or so. Namely: Get the big calls right! But also … Have you noticed that this sport is in the entertainment business? So here’s maybe the most important goal of all: “Doing things that make the game more interesting and more fun.” Those words came from a baseball official who has had input in this process. And even though it’s less than a month into this experiment, he has already noticed something about baseball in the ABS era. Yes, it’s probably too early to conclude much of anything. But the league has been polling fans on their reaction to what they’ve seen, by asking this question: The answer, from fans who attended games between March 26 and April 19: Yes — 92 percent No — 8 percent (Source: Major League Baseball) We eagerly await the results of independent polling on this topic. But if you’ve spent even one night in a big-league ballpark during the past few weeks, it couldn’t be more obvious. The buzz that accompanies every challenge cartoon on the scoreboard is telling us that the people paying to sit in those seats are gobbling up this stuff. “I think that one of the virtues of baseball is, we have things that we can argue about in a bar as we’re watching a game,” the same official said. “So one of the things that makes ABS challenge interesting is, you’re sitting there and it’s a 3-2 count, and a guy gets rung up on a called strike in the third inning with a runner on second. And you say: ‘Why the hell didn’t he challenge?’ I think that’s an interesting aspect of the game.” Remember: If you let those robot umps call every pitch, you lose all of that. So if full-time robot umpiring ever becomes a real decision MLB thinks it has to ponder, would it really be willing to give up the sheer entertainment value of this challenge system? If that answer is yes, we’d love to hear the explanation for that decision. A week or so ago, we were in the middle of a long ABS conversation with one of the executives quoted earlier. Suddenly, he fired off the question of the day: “Does anybody you’ve talked to say: ‘We would love to see full ABS?’” The honest answer is … no. Not a soul. Not a player. Not a manager. Not a coach. Not a single club official. Not an umpire. That about covers it. The umpires are a particularly interesting group to watch. Their first choice, obviously, would be all human umps all the time. Their no-way choice would be no human umps any of the time. Their jobs would be diminished in ways they could never get behind. And there’s one more thing: Players who have spoken with them say umpires don’t believe the ABS technology is precise enough to go full ABS. They’re uncomfortable with how the league is ignoring the margin of error that has already come into play with hundreds of pitches so far. And if full ABS ever did come along, hoo boy. Are we ready for a nightly array of strikes that have never been called strikes before? We should be, they say. So these umpires would obviously vote for a challenge system over that. In time, they’re likely to look at this the way they looked at replay — as an invention that can save them from Jim Joyce/Armando Galarraga type embarrassment. As McCann put it, “they don’t want to be the guy that’s all over SportsCenter, with people asking: ‘How did he call that?’” But meanwhile, inside the league office, they’re mostly abstaining from this debate — for the moment. They have many more games to watch. They have so much more challenge data to study. They know there is going to be a robot-ump controversy — or 12 — ahead. So they’re letting it all unfold. But we’ve sensed a gigantic shift in where this group stood a few years ago versus where it stands today. League officials have seen the challenge system in action. They’ve seen the polling. And they seem to be in no hurry to let those robots call all 700,000 pitches a year. “I know I’ve moved,” said one official who was once a strong believer in full ABS. “I’ve thought long and hard about this. I finally said: Do I just want to sit there and die on the hill of principle that every single pitch should be called correctly?” But as people in the game watch hundreds of calls a week get “fixed,” some do wonder if there are ways this challenge system can evolve to make it better. “I think you can find a middle ground,” one NL executive said, “between where we are today and every pitch being called by ABS.” Maybe, he said, each team should get three challenges. Or maybe a team that runs out of challenges should have the same option it has with replay — to ask for a crew-chief review. But this system needs some sort of tweak, he went on, to make sure no game ever ends like the Team USA-Dominican Republic semifinal, just because the losing team had no challenges in its pocket. “In the 250 to 300 pitches that typically occur in a nine-inning game, they’re not all going to be (called) right,” that exec said. “And not all of them need to be right. But you need to have more latitude than the two challenges they give you.” The league has signaled it is open to making future tweaks. It happened with replay. It happened with the pitch clock. For now, watching and waiting makes sense. Let’s just hope the thing they’re waiting for isn’t some kind of messy, avoidable ABS ending to a big Dodgers-Yankees game on Sunday Night Baseball. Or even worse yet, in October. “To me, that WBC game should be the impetus,” said the same exec. “It doesn’t have to happen again to know that it can happen and it can happen at the worst time. So what did we learn from that? And what do we have to change so that never happens (in a postseason game)?” But the change that seems to be off the table for the foreseeable future is the one that inspired this piece. Will we ever live on Planet Robot, where every pitch is in technology’s hands? Well, never say never. But with every ooh and every aah you hear when it’s time for Robot Ump Cartoon Theater, full ABS feels as far off in the future as baseball expansion to Mars. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms