Writing

Baseball waited a weirdly long time to fix bad strike calls

As a newer baseball fan, the ABS challenge system feels less like a breakthrough and more like the sport finally catching up to common sense.

I’m still relatively new to baseball, which might actually be helping me.

I’ve always liked sports. Football, tennis, golf, bowling, table tennis — if people are keeping score, I’m probably interested. Baseball was the one sport I never really got pulled into, and I’m still not entirely sure why. Which is funny, because I’ve always liked baseball games in person. They’re fun, relaxed, surprisingly engaging, and before you know it, three hours have disappeared and you’re somehow considering buying a cap.

Last season was when baseball finally got its claws into me.

I followed the Seattle Mariners much more closely down the stretch, got fully invested, and, like any proper Mariners experience, was eventually rewarded with disappointment. Specifically, the Blue Jays. Still annoying. But by then it was too late. I cared. This year I’ve been watching more games on TV, following more closely, and discovering that baseball is a deeply enjoyable sport built on top of several traditions that seem to have survived mostly because no one wanted to have an awkward conversation.

One of those traditions is the strike zone.

Or more specifically, the idea that we were all supposed to live with wildly inconsistent ball-strike calls for this long like it was part of the charm.

Which brings me to the ABS challenge system.

As a newer fan, my reaction was immediate: How did this take so long?

Seriously. What exactly were we protecting here? The sanctity of bad calls? The rich, time-honored tradition of an umpire calling a strike on a pitch that looked like it was trying to file for independence? Was that really the experience everyone felt so strongly about preserving?

Now that the ABS challenge system exists, it’s hard not to notice how obvious the whole thing feels. You challenge the call, the system checks it, and suddenly everyone can see what was true the entire time: sometimes the call was just wrong. Not philosophically debatable. Not “part of the human element.” Just wrong in the plainest possible sense.

And once you see that happen a few times, the old system starts to look a little ridiculous.

That’s the part I find so funny. Baseball didn’t introduce this like it had discovered fire. It introduced it like a sport reluctantly admitting that maybe fans don’t actually enjoy watching an avoidable mistake derail an at-bat. Big moment for everyone.

I understand the argument for the human element. I do. Sports should feel human. Imperfection belongs in the game. But there’s a difference between human drama and preventable nonsense. If a pitch is a strike, it should be a strike. If it’s a ball, it should be a ball. That feels less like a radical opinion and more like the minimum viable expectation for professional sports.

The ABS challenge system doesn’t ruin anything. If anything, it makes the game easier to trust.

It adds a little tension, fixes obvious misses, and spares everyone the usual routine of staring at the screen while an announcer politely tries not to say, “Yeah, that was terrible.” It also creates one of the rarest experiences in sports: watching a problem get solved in real time instead of endlessly defended out of habit.

Maybe that’s why this stands out so much to me as a newer fan. I don’t have decades of nostalgia tied to the old way of doing it. I’m just looking at the thing in front of me. And from that angle, the ABS challenge system doesn’t feel radical. It feels overdue.

Baseball is still baseball. The games are still long, weird, emotional, and occasionally cruel. The Mariners will still find exciting new ways to test my patience. None of that changes.

But getting the strike call right seems like a pretty good place to start.