There was a moment Saturday afternoon when a catcher named — and I checked this twice — Dalton something tapped the top of his helmet like he was signaling for a milkshake refill, and a computer somewhere in Florida reversed a called strike. My wife was in the kitchen. My dog was asleep on the good chair. And I, a grown man who has watched baseball since the Carter administration, said out loud to no one, “What are we doing here.”
This is the ABS challenge system, which stands for Automated Ball-Strike and sounds like something you’d order on a Bowflex. Major League Baseball rolled it out in spring training this year — three challenges a game, tap the helmet, and a laser in the outfield decides if Blue got it right. The league says fans love it. The league always says fans love it. The league said fans loved the ghost runner, too, and the ghost runner is a crime against the sport so obvious that future generations will ask us why we didn’t rise up.
I called Ray Kowalczyk about it Sunday morning, because Ray umpired American Legion ball for thirty-one years and has opinions on everything that happens behind home plate, including, once, a bee. Ray said, and I’m quoting him exactly, “Duke, the whole point of an umpire is that he’s wrong sometimes and you have to live with it. That’s the game. That’s America. You take the bad call home and you stew on it and you’re a better person Monday.” Ray then told me he had to go because his granddaughter was FaceTiming him from a Dairy Queen. Progress arrives on every front.
Here is what the helmet tap looks like, in case you have been spared. The catcher, or the pitcher, or the batter — any of the three — lightly taps the top of his helmet with an open palm, the way a maître d’ signals the busboy. Then everybody waits. Then a graphic pops up on the scoreboard like we’re in a video game. Then the call is reversed or upheld. Then we all clap or boo at a cartoon strike zone. Somewhere in Cooperstown, a bronze plaque of Bob Feller is quietly sliding off its wall.
The argument for all this, as I understand it from Marcus Delgado-Finch, who writes a Substack called “The Sabermetric Parlor” that someone keeps emailing me, is that the umpires get it wrong more than you’d think and the technology simply corrects for human error. Marcus wrote, “The ABS system reduces strike-zone variance by an estimated 4.7%, a meaningful delta for high-leverage at-bats.” Marcus, buddy. Pal. Friend. You have described exactly the thing that made baseball worth watching and called it a bug.
Coach DiMaggio, who I still quote more than my own father, used to say that an umpire was like weather: you didn’t argue with it, you dressed for it. You got a bad strike zone one night, you adjusted. You got a tight one the next night, you adjusted again. The ones who couldn’t adjust didn’t make varsity, and the ones who could adjust learned something that transferred to every other difficult thing in life, which is that the universe does not owe you a consistent strike zone and pretending it does will ruin you.
Now we are teaching twenty-two-year-olds the opposite. We are teaching them that if a decision goes against you, there is a button. Tap the button. The button will fix it. And if the button doesn’t fix it, you have been wronged, and we will sympathize with you, and we will put a graphic on the scoreboard explaining exactly how badly you were wronged, in inches, in real time. I am not a sociologist but I can see where this is going and it is not toward a generation of stoics.
The worst part — and I didn’t think there would be a worst part, but here we are — is that the broadcast loves it. They built a whole segment around it. Pitch comes in, ump calls it a ball, catcher taps his helmet, two announcers spend forty seconds analyzing the tap itself. Was it a confident tap? Was it a desperation tap? Is the catcher “in the catcher’s head” on these? There is now a meta-game of challenge psychology, and there are already, God help us, analysts who specialize in it.
I watched a Cactus League game on Saturday where a pitcher got squeezed on a 2-2 fastball, tapped his hat, got the call overturned, and then stood on the mound pointing two fingers at his temple like he was a genius. The catcher nodded at him. They tapped gloves. This was a February exhibition game in front of 3,400 people, one of whom was visibly eating a churro the size of a baseball bat. Somewhere Bob Gibson was being physically restrained.
I will say this for the new system, because I try to be fair even when I don’t want to be. The helmet tap is faster than a managerial replay challenge, which is the other modern innovation that has turned baseball games into a series of small legal proceedings. If we must have robots, let them be quick robots. And the umpires, to their credit, have handled the whole indignity with professional grace — they stand there while the laser tells them they were wrong, and then they crouch back down and keep working, which is more than most of us would do.
But I keep thinking about Petey Corrigan, who coached third base for forty years at a Catholic school up the turnpike from me, and who used to say the most important skill in baseball was the ability to be mad about something for exactly one pitch and then let it go. Petey was not a sophisticated man. Petey thought “launch angle” was something NASA did. But Petey understood that a sport is, fundamentally, a structured way to practice swallowing injustice, and that this practice is the thing you keep after the sport is gone.
You cannot tap your helmet at your boss. You cannot tap your helmet at the IRS. You cannot tap your helmet at the guy who cuts you off on 322 and you cannot tap your helmet at the doctor telling you the test came back funny, and baseball — real baseball, old baseball, the baseball that was here before the graphics package — used to teach you that. Now it teaches you that there’s always a review. There isn’t. There really, really isn’t.
Pitchers and catchers reported a couple weeks ago. Games started for real this weekend. I’ll still watch. I always watch. Denise is making pierogies tonight. She says the recipe’s from a TikTok.