ESPN’s Jeff Passan: Why ABS Has Been a Godsend for Baseball

Jeff Passan came on The Rich Eisen Show to talk about the automated ball-strike challenge system after one month of regular season use, and both men landed in the same place. They love it.

"It does two things," Passan said. "Number one, it solves the issue of bad calls from umpires. And number two, it does so in a way that actually is kind of entertaining." He called the combination a neat trick. Major League Baseball got tangible value, the missed-call problem, solved at the same time it got an entertainment beat that the broadcast can lean into.

Passan acknowledged the camp pushing for full ABS on every pitch with a standardized strike zone, the version with no missed calls and no theater. He understood the appeal and pushed back anyway. The minute the league does that, he said, it loses the moment that is currently working. The moment is the brief beat where the graphic comes up, the trail of the ball moves toward the box, and viewers wait for the sliver of pink to reveal a strike.

Rich agreed and pushed the entertainment frame harder. The league could simply throw a static dot on the screen showing where the pitch was. Instead, it asks the audience to wait. Door number one or door number two. Strike or ball. He pointed to players starting to add flair to the helmet tap and predicted, with Passan agreeing, that someone is eventually going to invent a bat-flip equivalent for the challenge gesture. Spinning around. Doing the splits and popping up into a tap. Rich invoked Enrico Palazzo from The Naked Gun. Passan was on board.

The how-do-the-umpires-feel question came next. Passan said it cannot feel good. He drew the parallel everyone in the room could feel. When most people make a mistake, they want to hide. Umpires make their mistakes on something literally called a jumbotron, in front of an entire stadium. He balanced it with a piece of news that has not gotten enough attention. Umpires now wear a two-way microphone and can talk to the ABS operator during the game. They can be told that they are calling strikes a little off the plate today and adjust in real time.

That real-time feedback, Passan argued, has made a difference. He said hitters want a consistent zone but more than anything want correct calls, and the closer umpires get to the truth, the better the game looks.

Rich asked the open question he had been sitting on. What hasn't happened yet with ABS that he should be expecting to see. He laid out the Rob Refsnyder case, the called strike three that became a home run after a successful challenge, and the Jonah Heim mess from the previous day, the catcher caught between retrieving a loose ball and challenging the call.

Passan went straight to baserunner edge cases. If a runner is going on the pitch, a ball is called, the call is challenged and reversed to a strike, where does that runner end up. Generally, he said, the runner gets sent back to first. He acknowledged that baseball will always cough up a scenario the rule book has not seen. He just hopes the first really weird one does not show up in October. The whole point of the system, he said, is to let players decide outcomes instead of adjudicators.