Robot umpires are officially knocking on the MLB’s door.
Commissioner Rob Manfred told The Athletic’s Evan Drellich on Wednesday that the league will test an automated ball-strike challenge system during spring training in 2025, with the hope that the system can be implemented into the regular season in 2026.
The system will reportedly give teams two challenges per game, and keep them if they are correct. Reportedly, not every spring training field will have the ABS cameras, but all teams will have the opportunity to play with them.
From athletics:
“I think we will have an ABS test in spring training that will give all major league players a meaningful opportunity to see what the challenge system will look like,” Manfred said. “From my perspective, there are two sides to that test: it’s about how clubs feel about it, and also: what do the players think about it? And we’ll have to figure both of those out.’
MLB has experimented with ABS systems in the minor leagues dating back to 2019, in two formats. Some games used the robo-umps to call every pitch, while others used the challenge system that was about to start spring training.
The challenge system was used full-time in Triple-A, and you can see here that it ended a game:
At one point last year, MLB said teams had a 47% success rate with challenges.
Robo-umps once felt like a radical change for MLB, but they’ve become inevitable because of the way MLB has approached them. Because they have been active in the minor leagues for years, many of the current major leaguers already have experience with the system.
It’s been a very slow transition for the league, but it seems almost over. There will almost certainly be grumbling about the system (not every pitch that is technically a strike looks like a strike, and the same goes for balls), but many fans will adopt a human element that can be infuriating at times.
