Tap of approval: Cardinals get up to speed on baseball’s robo-umps
Thomas Saggese stood in the batter’s box at Roger Dean Stadium on Friday morning and watched a fastball from teammate Richard Fitts zip through the vicinity of the outside corner of home plate.
From behind a protective screen set up behind the pitcher’s mound, a coach holding an iPad bellowed “strike.” Saggese, almost out of reflex, brought his right hand up to the top of his helmet and tapped it vigorously.
Baseball’s esoteric database of nonverbal signals and cues is about to expand in a major way in the major leagues, and the St. Louis Cardinals spent a chunk of Friday’s final workouts before game action acclimating themselves in a more serious way to the automated balls and strikes system, set to make its regular-season debut in MLB this year.
Under the system, each team begins a game with two challenges of ball-strike calls that a pitcher, hitter or catcher may use at their discretion. A successful challenge is retained, and a team that’s out of challenges before the start of each extra inning will be given one additional challenge to use in that inning.
The challenges are meant to be immediate, without any assistance given from teammates or the dugout, and the results will be shown live in the stadium (and presumably on the television broadcast) via a graphical representation of the strike zone and the area where ball transited through it – or, as the case may be, did not.
With ongoing construction still very much taking place inside Roger Dean Stadium with about 24 hours to go until the Cardinals’ spring opener, the team didn’t get the chance to experience the full graphical interface and make use of the scoreboard for a full run of the challenge system.
The projected strike zone from the radars set up to track bullpen work offers a close enough approximation, and the number of players who have utilized the system in the minors in recent years gives a little institutional knowledge to the team’s evaluation of their process.
“There’s a heck of a lot to look at and make sure you’re not missing anything,” manager Oli Marmol said. “That’s why it’ll be important to have certain coaches who have experienced it and have had to plan for it, and then guys from upstairs as well that can provide some strategy and stats on how [challenges] were used, what was effective, what wasn’t.”
Outfielder Matt Koperniak has taken more than 1,000 plate appearances for Triple-A Memphis over the last two seasons, all under the auspices of the ABS system. His experience led him to believe that the challenge system made the strike zone “probably the most accurate it’s been.”
“We only got two challenges, so we had to be sort of strategic with them,” Koperniak said. “It was like, just using them in purposeful counts. Like a 3-2, a 3-0, something like that. If you’re gonna strike out, or you’re gonna walk, sure.”
There’s also a school of thought that challenges should be held as deep into the game as possible so that they can be enacted at the highest-leverage moments.
On June 2, 2023, Memphis played a game against the Omaha Storm Chasers in which Errol Robinson was initially called out looking on a 1-2 pitch that would’ve ended the game as a one-run Redbirds loss. A quick tap of the helmet reversed the call from strike to ball, and the next pitch was put in play for a fielding error that tied the game.
It was a small moment and a small gesture that changed – or in that case, delayed – the final result of a game, and those moments will add up over the course of a long season.
“They definitely want us to wait for a bigger spot to use them,” said Gordon Graceffo, who’s tossed 175 1/3 innings for Memphis over the last two seasons. “If there’s a difference between an out and walking a guy, that’s when you would use it.”
That can all be tested, and teams can model out how frequently they’re using their challenges and whether they need to be more aggressive with their deployment. One variable that can’t be thoroughly tested, however, is the same variable being controlled in part by the system – the comportment of a very human umpire.
Baseball is a game of endless unwritten rules and expected concessions to imagined propriety. It doesn’t seem terribly far-fetched to imagine veteran umpires getting their dander up at the mere suggestion that a neophyte player would dare to question their strike zone recognition. Marmol pushed back on that possibility as a concern.
“At the end of the day, you talk to the umpires, they want to get the call right,” he said. “This is helpful to everyone. They don’t want to be in a situation where – it’s so hard to do what they do, it really is – that it impacts the game.”
That is the idealized version of an umpire’s reaction, and it will be by far the most common. The small wrinkles in the system have been largely ironed out through implementation in the minor leagues, and the fact that the system is just now showing up in big league games doesn’t mean it’s being enacted without any foundational understanding.
Saggese’s view of the strike zone was just slightly incorrect. He’ll be far from the last to get a theoretical challenge wrong. That they now exist at all still feels like a major competitive leap forward.
