ROUND ROCK – Baseball Jan tried to be nice, but she doesn’t like the automated ball-strike system or its alter ego, the ABS challenge, each employed at Triple-A ballparks this season as baseball tinkers with ways to police its strike zone. As her nickname may imply, Jan Opella is a fundamentalist. One trial system renders home-plate umpires useless, she argues, and the other still has too many glitches.
One of her front-row neighbors at Dell Diamond cut straight to the point.
“I prefer nothin’,” Tim Hoppoch said, “because you can’t yell at the umpires now.”
Baseball Jan nodded.
“You can’t argue with a computer,” she said.
Welcome to the future of baseball, a sneak peek getting mixed reviews here from players, officials and fans of the Round Rock Express, the Rangers’ Triple-A farm club. Umpires and ABS officials declined to be interviewed, but the consensus is that pitchers hate it, hitters love it and everyone’s unanimous the big leagues will adopt one form or the other, though no earlier than 2025.
Down at Dell Diamond, here’s how it works: Tuesdays through Thursdays, if you didn’t know any better, you’d think nothing’s changed. The location of pitches is recorded by a series of cameras hooked up to a computer that relays calls to the umpire behind the plate, who signals “strike” or feigns indifference for a “ball,” as umps have done since time immemorial.
Fridays through Sundays, pitches are called by umps, not cameras, but each team is given three opportunities to appeal a call. Win, and the call not only gets overturned, you keep the challenge. Lose, and you’re down an appeal, too. Also, only the hitter, pitcher or catcher can challenge, not the bench, and the appeal must be made within two seconds.
If all this sounds confusing, think how the guinea pigs must feel. Joe Barlow, who’s yo-yoed between here and Arlington all summer, calls himself a member of the “whatever” camp, though he was just fine with things as they were before computers took over.
He thought a moment.
“I could be wrong,” he said, “because I thought the pitch clock would be bad for the game as well, but that seems to be pretty good.”
Depends on the day, probably.
The final authority
Kelvis Velez set up behind the catcher in Thursday’s game as umpires usually do: feet spread, knees flexed, head peeking over the player’s shoulder, as if he were whispering to him. You’d never know he wasn’t actually calling his own pitches. For all his input mattered, he might as well have been rocking a La-Z-Boy.
Through the device in his right ear, Velez waited to hear a Siri-like voice tell him if it was a ball or strike and responded accordingly, whether he agreed or not.
Get this: Umps are not the final authority in either of the ABS systems, which will take some getting used to.
“My first game up here,” Round Rock catcher Jordan Procyshen said, “it was a full ABS game, and the umpire was like, ‘Holy crap, I definitely had that as a ball,’ or, ‘I had a strike.’ "
Doesn’t help, probably, that the parameters keep changing. Last year at Round Rock, the ABS strike zone was 19 inches wide, apparently leading to too many strikeouts. This year, it’s 17 inches, effectively eliminating the black.
“This one feels a little tight to me,” said Owen White, just days before he was called up to the bigs. “This one’s like trying to shoot a gun down the barrel.”
Which is tougher on some pitchers than others.
“Especially as a guy who wants to live on the corners,” said Chase Lee, whose side-arm style earned him the nickname “The Viper.”
From a developmental standpoint, Lee conceded the shrunken strike zone might be a good thing, forcing pitchers to throw strikes. Dave Borkowski, Round Rock’s pitching coach, said he likes the challenge for his charges.
What he doesn’t like: a “floating strike zone” at the top. In order to calculate the size of the zone for each hitter, measurements were taken in their stocking feet. According to those with knowledge of MLB’s directives, the system had to account for players as disparate in height as Aaron Judge (6-7) and Jose Altuve (5-6).
The working results suggest that something went wrong with the data, or Altuve skewed the results for everyone.
“I think it’s probably a little low in most places,” Round Rock manager Doug Davis said. “I think throughout the league, from stadium to stadium, it’s not particularly consistent. You have some places where the bottom of the strike zone is lower than other places. But all in all, the top of the zone is certainly low.”
How low?
“Like, you know, it seems like the belt’s not even a strike,” Borkowski said.
Hard to say in the Thursday game if a 20-something fan a dozen rows up from the third base dugout agreed with Borkowski’s sentiment or was insufficiently clued in as to how the system worked. In the ninth inning of the Express’ 2-1 loss to Reno, he broke the silence.
“Horrible call,” he said, with no discernible sense of irony.
Computer error
Baseball Jan was back for Friday’s game in Sect. 121, Row 1, seats 16 and 17, after sitting out the previous couple of games because of the heat. These particular seats – bearing her name and nickname -- haven’t been hers since the Express’ 2000 debut, but she’s been here from the get-go. Fans and team officials say they miss her when she doesn’t make the hour-long drive from Bastrop. You can’t miss her down front.
Short, steel-gray hair spilling from a faded blue Round Rock cap decorated with season-ticket holder pins; an earpiece for the radio broadcast; wire-rim glasses focusing a doesn’t-miss-a-thing gaze.
In her backpack, Jan, a 67-year-old school psychologist by trade, carried a 35-mm camera, scorebook, water bottle and a blue towel to mop her impish face.
In the third inning, a fan walked down and handed her a beer, unsolicited.
“You’re a fine dude,” she said, cracking it open.
On nights when the crowd is light, officials say you can hear her all the way up in the press box, stoking players and riding umps. Such was not the case in Friday’s game. Maybe the crowd was too loud. Maybe it was too hot.
Maybe it’s just not the same with Big Brother watching. Jan said she hasn’t gotten on an ump since last year.
“Computer error! Computer error!” is the best she can muster these days.
When plate umpires make a mistake on challenge nights, the hitter, catcher or pitcher appeals so fast, there’s no time to think up clever insults. A scoreboard graphic illustrating the pitch and its relationship to the strike zone comes and goes just as quickly.
Before you can work up a good snit, complaints are lodged and rectified.
Not everyone is happy about progress.
“I should be able to get on this guy behind the plate for screwing up calls,” complained Hoppoch, a long-time season-ticket holder.
“Why sit this close for any other reason?”
At least they had a good view of challenges in the Friday game. Reno won the first four appeals, meaning theirs or Round Rock’s. Sam Huff, since elevated to Arlington, lost on consecutive pitches in the sixth. The first was a “ball” that Reno protested; the second, a “strike” that he challenged. He didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow on his return to the dugout.
Even if you could argue, it’s no use. Change is coming. Davis, who said it’s gone as smoothly as you could hope, figures it’ll be ready to go in 2025, though he’s not sure the challenge system will work in the big leagues. Borkowski doesn’t really care for either system, but, forced to choose, he’d pick the challenge.
“Still keeps a little bit of old school human element,” he said, “but you got some checks and balances in there.
“And I think the umpires get held a little bit accountable.”
Bubba Thompson is all for that.
“The umpires really don’t mess up that much,” the fleet outfielder said, “but it’s just some of those moments are in the wrong moment at the wrong time.”
He won’t miss the human element, though. He figures umps have missed long enough.
“New things come along,” he said. “It’s gonna keep getting better and better.”
Twitter: @KSherringtonDMN
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