Watching Laz Diaz umpire home plate yesterday, and the way both teams basically froze up after unsuccessfully using one challenge in the first PA of the game, reinforced for me that two ABS challenges is insufficient. But, a little before that, I had read this Jayson Stark article in The Athletic about the headwinds, such as they are, I guess, against a full, no-challenge, ABS implementation. The article to me was less “coverage” and more of an op-ed, i.e., it felt very normative of backfilling facts after starting with the position that full ABS would be a disaster, but it is what it is.
I think given the reporting in that article and what we’ve seen so far, where the number of challenges is simply too low for even strategic use (unless you think using one early and hoarding the other until the game is largely decided is strategic), it’s nearly a certainty that the number of challenges increases eventually — and potentially sooner rather than later. Maybe it’ll just go incrementally up, or maybe we really will shift to a “one per X innings” system, I don’t know. But from Stark’s reporting (or “reporting”), it does seem like two won’t be any kind of long-term solution.
Still, I’m wondering about what Stark’s article rules out. Even if it’s not a slippery slope, it’s still a slope, and maybe MLB eventually finds some kind of point where everyone feels like they have enough challenges, but there will always be edge cases where a “boy I wish we had more challenges” case sneaks through.
Anyway, think of the long arc of the universe and answer the question accordingly.
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