Commentary: ABS system is totally unnecessary

The first games of the newborn baseball season have channeled more than enough obsessing over balls and strikes, due no doubt to the long-anticipated introduction of ABS technology, or officially, the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System Brought to You by Some Corporate Tech Behemoth. As long as there have been arguments over the umpire calling 'em as he sees 'em, there have been efforts to refine the game's core process, such as the solution my brother and I adopted for the Wiffle Ball wars in the yard. That the yard was not really a yard — it was more a patch of fenced-in grass at the side of the house — and the fact that just about every other generic rule had been mangled to fit the physical restraints of the playing field — baserunning had been eliminated, for example — the advent of our own ABS didn't seem intrusive at all. In fact, we thought it was brilliant. At beautiful Fourth Street Stadium, where a grounder that found its way through the open gate was an automatic double, anything that went onto the front porch and stayed there was a triple. Homers were defined as any ball jacked across the street to the far sidewalk on the fly — you didn't "go yard," you "went street." So the fact that balls and strikes were being called by a trash can seemed perfectly prudent. We put the dented, silver trash can — standard for the era — on the spot where the catcher would be, and any pitch you declined to swing at that ticked off the trash can was a called strike. No tick? Ball 1. The first ABS. That we knew of. As for real Major League Baseball, it wasn't until a half century later, specifically Wednesday night, that an inanimate entity determined whether a pitch was a ball or strike and history recorded it as a strike to New York Yankees shortstop Jose Caballero. He tapped his helmet to trigger the process by which 12 Hawk-Eye cameras throughout the stadium positioned the pitch in relation to the batter's individualized strike zone on the scoreboard, and that's that. Caballero thought it was a ball, but the ABS determined it was a strike, just as home plate umpire Bill Miller said it was. The Yankees were leading 5-0 in the fourth inning of the first of 162 games, so yeah, I'm glad we got that right. The ABS works quickly and looks to be blessedly unobtrusive. Caballero's was the only challenge of that game (teams can challenge twice, but can continue until they are unsuccessful twice). There were three challenges in the Pittsburgh Pirates-New York Mets opener, one of which cost the Pirates a run. Oneil Cruz drew a walk in the third, but a challenge by the pitcher determined the last pitch was actually called strike three, and Brandon Lowe homered a moment later. Cruz's performance to that point proved way more annoying than any spasm of new technology. The issue here, obviously, isn't so much the tech but the idea of it — perhaps best expressed by the highly-accomplished pitcher Max Scherzer, who asked my friend, the highly-accomplished baseball writer Jayson Stark, "Can we just play baseball? We're humans. Can we just be judged by humans?" In a time when we're being judged and monitored and manipulated by machines and algorithms every minute, Scherzer's notion seems almost quaint, which is not to suggest such viewpoints retain no value. Scherzer was just hoping, as was I, that baseball could somehow maintain its position as the sport that's most like life and nature. It has quotidian rhythms and rewards persistence and long-haul competence in the full knowledge that on a lot of days, things will simply not go your way. Life is hard, and so is baseball, maybe you've noticed. You can be the defending American League Most Valuable Player and strike out four times on Opening Night, as did Aaron Judge in San Francisco, donning the metaphoric Golden Sombrero right there on Netflix. You can be the defending National League Cy Young Award Winner and not be able to get out of the first inning against the Mets on Opening Day, as Paul Skenes learned Thursday on national TV. Baseball games are determined as much by humbling events large and small as by the considerable skills of the players, most of whom make way more mistakes than the umpires, by the way. According to ESPN, umpires called nearly 400,000 pitches last year and got 93% of them right, their best percentage ever. Yet somehow, umpires are the only humans on the field who are not allowed to make mistakes. Over the course of five decades writing about baseball, I've rarely been an apologist for the umpires. More accurately, I've been a royal pain, quick to point out their needless truculence and occasional incompetence. But as the game finally arrives at the point where it measured every single player in spring training to get the correct strike zone data for the ABS, and as the indefatigable metrics analysts have already generated a stat to track the interface between teams and tech (overturns vs. expected), I'm still comfortable with the notion that the ultimate definition of a strike is a pitch the umpire calls a strike, same for a ball. Even if the umpire is a trash can.