Former MLB umpire fears officials face humiliation by ‘computer geeks’ under ABS | MLB
Former major league umpire Richie Garcia worries about the impact robot officials will have on their human counterparts.
Major League Baseball introduced the automated ball-strike system for regular-season games in 2016, starting with the New York Yankees’ home opener in San Francisco on Wednesday night. Teams will have the ability to appeal strike zone decisions to a system based on 12 Hawk-Eye cameras.
“I think it’s embarrassing, embarrassing for the umpires who call the game. Nobody likes to be humiliated in front of 30,000 or 40,000 people,” said Garcia, a major league umpire from 1975 to 1999. “What Major League Baseball is saying is: I don’t trust the umpire’s strike zone, so I’m going to use something that will be operated by a computer geek who doesn’t doesn’t know anything about baseball, and he’s the one who’s going to measure this and measure that because he has a doctorate in physics or whatever he has a degree in.”
Garcia was criticized for not calling a strike on a 2-2 pitch from San Diego’s Mark Langston to the Yankees’ Tino Martinez in Game 1 of the 1998 World Series, and Martinez hit a game-clinching grand slam on the next offering that propelled New York to a four-game sweep.
Although there is constant debate over decisions, the referees were overall the most accurate they have ever been last year. There were 368,898 regular season pitches called by big league umpires last season, an average of 152 per game. The 92.83% accuracy rate was the highest – an average of 10.88 missed calls per game, according to MLB. This is down from the average of 16.58 missed calls per game in 2016, when the accuracy rate was 89.31%.
“I’m 60 years old and it seems to me that the younger generation really wants this technology and wants to have the certainty that a pitch is a ball or a strike,” said Ted Barrett, a major championship umpire from 1994 to 2022.
Under ABS, each team gets two challenges per match and keeps one challenge if successful. A team outside challenges gets an additional one in each additional round.
“As an umpire, you never want to miss anything. You want to be 100% right, but we’re all human and that’s just not possible,” said Sam Holbrook, an MLB umpire from 1996 to 2022. “Social media and the media have really hammered umpires for pitches that are just tiny out of the zone or in the zone or whatever, and it’s just too hard to be perfect with all of this. I think it will be good to correct the blatant throws. I think it will show how good the referees are.
A quarter of a century of electronic assessment
MLB installed an umpire information system developed by Questec in select ballparks in 2001 and was upgraded to league-wide zone assessment in 2009 as part of the PITCHf/x system. TrackMan’s Doppler radar system took over in 2017 as part of MLB Statcast.
Since 2009, umpires have received a ZE rating for every game played behind the plate. Since 2014, they have also been overthrown by expanded video review.
“It’s mentally difficult for a referee because you’ve failed at your job and there’s this instant feedback of failure,” Barrett said. “Nobody wants to fail at their job, but there’s also the, hey, thank God I didn’t cost this team a game or a point or a pennant. Nobody wants to live with that. And so we take the positive of that. The negative is sometimes it’s like: What am I doing out there? I got knocked down twice at first base.”
Under ABS, a strike is defined as when the ball crosses the middle of home plate in a box 53.5% of the batter’s height at the top and 27% at the bottom. This differs from the strike zone of a cube whose top is the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants and whose bottom is at the hollow below the kneecap.
“They’re going to change to whatever the ABS calls it, whether it’s challenging or not because, remember, they’re being evaluated on their performance based on that ABS,” Barrett said.
Spring training test results from 2026
Philadelphia had the best spring training challenge success rate among teams at the plate at 61 percent, followed by the Chicago Cubs (60 percent), Boston and Seattle (54 percent each), while Texas and Arizona (33 percent each) and Kansas City (34 percent) were at the bottom of the ladder.
St Louis (75%), Cincinnati (71%) and Cleveland (70%) dominated the fielding challenges, while the Los Angeles Dodgers (43%) and Baltimore (45%) lagged behind.
Batters have won 46% of 887 challenges and defense has won 60% of 1,020. The Yankees have won the most challenges overall with 54, and Arizona, Dodgers and New York Mets are tied for the fewest wins with 20.
Boston’s Willson Contreras had the most batting challenges and hit six of seven. Philadelphia’s Christian Cairo had the most challenges among hitters with a 100% success rate at four.
