NEW YORK — Richie Garcia is worried about the impact that robot umpires will have on their human counterparts.
Major League Baseball introduced the automated ball-strike system for regular-season play this season starting with the New York Yankees’ opener at San Francisco on Wednesday night, giving teams a chance to appeal strike zone decisions to a system based on 12 Hawk-Eye cameras.
“I think it’s embarrassing, embarrassing to the umpires that are calling the game. Nobody likes to be humiliated in front of 30,000, 40,000 people,” said Garcia, a major league umpire from 1975 to 1999. “What Major League Baseball is saying is: I don’t trust the umpire’s strike zone, so I’m going to use something that’s going to be operated by some computer geek that knows nothing about baseball, and he’s the one that’s going to measure this and measure that because he’s got a Ph.D. in physics or whatever the hell he’s got a degree in.”
Garcia drew criticism for not calling a strike on a 2-2 pitch from San Diego’s Mark Langston to the Yankees’ Tino Martinez in the 1998 World Series opener, and Martinez hit a tiebreaking grand slam on the next offering that sparked New York to a four-game sweep.
Umpires keep improving
While there is constant debate over calls, umpires were overall their most accurate ever last year. Just not as perfect as technology.
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There were 368,898 regular-season pitches called by big league umps last season, an average of 152 per game. The 92.83% accuracy rate was the highest ever — an average of 10.88 missed calls per game, according to MLB. That is down from an average of 16.58 missed calls per game in 2016, when the accuracy rate was 89.31%.
“I’m 60, and it seems to me like the younger generation really wants this technology and they want the certainty of a pitch being a ball or a strike,” said Ted Barrett, a big league ump from 1994 to 2022.
Under ABS, each team gets two challenges per game and keeps a challenge if successful. A team out of challenges gets one additional in each extra inning.
“As an umpire, you never want to miss anything. You want to be absolutely 100% correct, but we’re all human and that’s just not possible,” said Sam Holbrook, an MLB umpire from 1996 to 2022. “Social media and the media have really been hammering the umpires for pitches that are just minutely off the zone or in the zone or whatever, and it’s just too hard to be perfect with all of this. I think it’s going to be good to correct any egregious pitches. I think it’s going to show how good the umpires actually are.”
A quarter-century of electronic evaluation
MLB installed an Umpire Information System developed by QuesTec at some ballparks in 2001 and upgraded to a leaguewide Zone Evaluation in 2009 as part of the PITCHf/x system. TrackMan’s Doppler radar system took over in 2017 as part of MLB Statcast.
Since 2009, umpires have received a Z-E evaluation for every game they work behind the plate. Since 2014, they also have experienced getting overturned by expanded video review.
“It’s tough mentally on an umpire because you failed at your job and there’s that instant feedback of failure,” Barrett said. “Nobody wants to fail at your job, but then there’s also the, hey, thank God I didn’t cost that team a game or a run or a pennant. No one wants to live with that. And so we take the positive of that. The negative is sometimes it’s like: What am I doing over there? I got overturned twice at first base.”
Under ABS, a strike is defined as when the ball crosses over the plate at the midpoint of the plate in a box 53.5% of the batter’s height at the top and 27% at the bottom. That is different from the rulebook strike zone of a cube whose top is the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants and whose bottom is at the hollow beneath the kneecap.
“They’re going to change to what the ABS calls, whether it’s a challenge or not, because, remember, they are getting evaluated on their performance based on that ABS,” Barrett said.
Spring training test results from 2026
Philadelphia had the best spring training challenge success rate among teams at the plate with 61%, followed by the Chicago Cubs (60%), Boston and Seattle (54% each), while Texas and Arizona (33% each) and Kansas City (34%) were at the bottom.
St. Louis (75%), Cincinnati (71%) and Cleveland (70%) topped challenge success by fielding teams, while the Los Angeles Dodgers (43%) and Baltimore (45%) lagged.
Batters won 46% of 887 challenges and defense 60% of 1,020. The Yankees won the most challenges overall with 54, and Arizona, the Dodgers and the New York Mets tied for the fewest wins with 20.
Boston’s Willson Contreras had the most batter challenges and was successful on six of seven. Philadelphia’s Christian Cairo had the most challenges among batters with a 100% success rate at four.
Among catchers, Pedro Pages of St. Louis was 8-for-8, Cincinnati’s P.J. Higgins 7-for-7 and Milwaukee’s Jeferson Quero 6-for-6.
Edgar Quero of the Chicago White Sox was 2-for-11, Payton Henry of the Yankees 1-for-9 and Austin Wynns of the Athletics 0-for-7.
