It’s been long awaited. It’s been tested in Minor League Baseball at the Triple-A level. It was even used during the 2026 MLB All-Star Game here in Atlanta. Now, it’ll be arriving across Major League Baseball starting next season. MLB has officially announced that the “Challenge System” is going to be used from here on out. Whether it’s a spring training game, a regular season game or a Postseason game, the option will be there for the “robots” to help either correct or confirm a number of a calls per game in and around the strike zone.
In case you’re wondering how it works, here’s a brief breakdown: The rules are that each team gets two challenges and you keep your challenge if it’s successful. The three players involved in a pitch (a.k.a the pitcher, catcher and batter) are the only ones allowed to challenge and you have to do so immediately after the call and without any help from anybody outside of the three players involved. Everybody gets at least one challenge in extra innings and that only exists in case a team has run out of challenges.
They also went through the meticulous process of adding a bunch of Hawk-Eye cameras (12, to be exact) in each ballpark and then every single big league player will have their own individualized rectangular strike zone after being measured by independent testers during spring training.
Here’s a quick look at how it will work — but in video form:
Your browser does not support the video tag.
MLB posted some data from spring training which showed that of the 288 games that were played, there were around four challenges per game and calls were overturned at a clip of just over half of the time. The number of challenges per game were also pretty evenly split between the hitters and the defense but the defense had the edge on overturn rate at 54 percent. The offense had an overturn rate of exactly 50 percent but also, they challenged 4.4 percent of called pitches compared to the defense challenging around 1.8 percent of called pitches.
MLB also shared the fan reaction from a survey and as you could imagine, the fans were beyond ready to see this. 72 percent of fans polled at least had a positive response to ABS technology, with a whopping 52 percent being “Very Positive” in that regard. Only 10 percent of fans had a negative response to the ABS system, with only 31 percent of fans also saying that they would prefer human umpires over the ABS system and 69 percent being in favor.
Plain and simple, anything that could potentially cut down on the number of missed calls during a game (especially in crucial moments in the contest) is a good thing for baseball and this will certainly be a welcome change for baseball players, managers, coaches and fans. Even the umpires should hopefully appreciate the extra help since this should ideally help them get better and provide some help for what is a notoriously difficult job behind the plate. Basically, it’s hard to find any downsides here and I’m excited to see how this goes starting next season.
