ABS: No Need for Humiliation

(As I’m sitting down to write this, I’m noticing the report and quote I’m reacting to — spotted on Facebook a week or so back — is actually from back in March, during Spring Training, and not at all recent. That said, I’m pressing on and writing it anyway, because I need a July article, and we’re coming out of the All-Star break, so baseball is topical!)

Scrolling through Facebook a week or so ago, I spotted a quote, attributed to umpire Richie Garcia, about the Automated Balls and Strikes (ABS) challenge system used by Major League Baseball starting this season:

“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.”

Not to unfairly diminish his viewpoint, I do need to add two expository points before bringing my own lukewarm take:

1. Garcia isn’t a current MLB umpire. I don’t recall if the graphic version of the quote I saw explicitly noted he was former, but he hasn’t been on the field since 1999.
2. As noted in my preface, while I didn’t see the quote until last week, it was made and reported on in March of this year — after years of testing in the minor leagues, but before it had seen wide use outside of exhibition in Spring Training at the MLB level.

All that said, I don’t feel like there needs to be a lot of humiliation from these challenges. Instead, this is an opportunity.

Umpires are human beings. Human beings make mistakes sometimes. We’re not perfect and never will be, and a certain percentage of the ball and strike calls made by that ump are going to be incorrect. Any expectation that the umpires are flawless robots who never do wrong was folly from the start, and it was unfair to expect perfection where it can’t possibly exist.

Baseball had long had rules in place effectively prohibiting challenges to the umpire’s judgement calls about balls and strikes — what he (or recently she) said was the law, and while they had different limits from ump to ump, beyond a certain level, complaints about how that strike zone was being called got folks sudden departures to the clubhouse shower.

The primary purpose of ABS is to fix those mistakes, those incorrect calls, in near-real time, and keep the game moving, without the arguing, and without the ejections. It’s not to embarrass the human officials who made the original call. It’s there to help.

I’d hope that, as we’re getting used to this new tool, this opportunity to correct the errors, we can collectively see it as that — a help, a guide, a refinement — and not as a source of humiliation. A chance to say “Yep, I biffed that one; fortunately the system caught it, and we’re back on track,” and not get lost in the weeds over it.

At the same time, let’s also not get too carried away with the players making those challenges when they pick the wrong calls to contest. They’re human, too.

But, of course… this is sport. So there will always be loudmouthed idiots letting beer emotions take them over, with the resulting unnecessary embarrassment following.

But I can always hope.