Who’s Getting Their Money’s Worth From the ABS Challenge System?
Over the weekend, a friend of mine asked if ABS challenge data gets incorporated into WAR. (I have extremely cool friends.) It doesn’t, and I explained that while an individual challenge can absolutely change the course of an inning (or a game, or even a season), a single ball-strike call is of negligible run value out of context. If anything, we should be adding challenges to WPA, not WAR, except WPA only gets calculated on a per-plate-appearance basis, rather than a per-pitch basis.
At any rate, challenges aren’t like catcher framing in the early days. In 2008, the first year for which we have framing data, the difference between the best framer in baseball (Brian McCann) and the worst (Ryan Doumit, the poor guy) was 97.7 runs. At 10 runs per win, well, you can do the math on your own.
Doumit was an outlier, some 36 runs adrift of the back of the pack. In 2007, he was a 2.1-WAR player, with a 109 wRC+ in 279 plate appearances. Add in framing data, and in 2008 Doumit increased his offensive output to a 123 wRC+ in 265 plate appearances… and lost more than five wins, finishing at -3.1 WAR.
McCann, who was one of three catchers with 30 or more framing runs, posted 8.3 WAR, thanks to a .301/.373/.523 batting line from behind the plate. That made him the second-most valuable position player in the league that year, trailing only Albert Pujols.
Once the implications of framing became clear, the gap closed quickly. If the Pirates had known then what we know now, Doumit would’ve been a first baseman or an outfielder. Those who stayed behind the plate quickly learned pitch framing as an art. In 2008, the difference between the best and worst framers in the league (taking Doumit out of the equation for a moment) was about 60 runs. In 2025, the gap was half that size. If you disregard another outlier (a good one this time, Patrick Bailey), every catcher in the league was within 10 runs either side of average, give or take a run or two.
Challenges aren’t like that. Everyone has known from the start that they’re being watched, so this is a skill everyone has known they had to strategize for. And insofar as challenging ball-strike calls is a skill, it’s one that only gets deployed a couple times per game, rather than dozens.
Through this past weekend, Sal Stewart leads the league in run value from challenges won, with 3.7. This metric is a counting stat, unlike framing, which is pegged to league average. There’s no direct penalty for losing a challenge, and while it’s probably possible to quantify the opportunity cost of losing a challenge, I know I’m nowhere near good enough at math to take that problem on. It seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
That means that Stewart, who’s won 23 challenges, gets his 3.7 runs. Troy Johnston, who’s challenged a league-leading six times without a win, gets zero. That’s a rounding error, in the world of WAR.
But batter challenges are a small piece of the puzzle. The opposing pitcher and catcher can challenge as well, and catchers get credit for challenges they initiate while on defense. (Whether it’s fair to debit a hitter for challenges initiated against him is a reasonable methodological question, but I’m going to do it anyway.)
The catcher who’s profited most from challenging this season has been Shea Langeliers, who’s 52-for-86 behind the plate, racking up 7.19 runs. Langeliers, somewhat puzzlingly, has only challenged once as a hitter, but even so, he leads all position players with 6.55 total challenge runs.
At the other end of the spectrum is James Wood, who is a pretty shocking 6-for-19 on challenges. Opposing catchers, by contrast, have won 23 of 35 challenges on pitches thrown to Wood, costing him 4.55 runs. That’s the largest figure in the league by a huge margin: three quarters of a run over second-place Ian Happ, and a full run over third-place Brett Baty. On the whole, Wood is 3.65 runs in the red on challenges. Sucks to be tall in the world of ABS, I guess.
| Name | Total Rev. | Batter Rev. | Overturned | Pct. | Runs | Opp. Rev. | Overturned | Runs | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cal Raleigh | 22 | 15 | 10 | 66.7% | 3.36 | 7 | 4 | -0.66 | 2.70 |
| Sal Stewart | 57 | 41 | 23 | 56.1% | 3.71 | 16 | 9 | -1.27 | 2.43 |
| José Caballero | 33 | 24 | 14 | 58.3% | 2.25 | 9 | 3 | -0.31 | 1.93 |
| Kyle Karros | 28 | 15 | 9 | 60.0% | 2.73 | 13 | 4 | -0.83 | 1.91 |
| Bryan Reynolds | 38 | 19 | 10 | 52.6% | 3.59 | 19 | 13 | -1.70 | 1.89 |
| Nolan Schanuel | 51 | 33 | 19 | 57.6% | 3.40 | 18 | 13 | -1.68 | 1.72 |
| Ronald Acuña Jr. | 26 | 17 | 7 | 41.2% | 1.71 | 9 | 0 | 0.00 | 1.71 |
| Coby Mayo | 18 | 12 | 7 | 58.3% | 1.71 | 6 | 1 | -0.18 | 1.53 |
| Juan Soto | 30 | 16 | 10 | 62.5% | 2.28 | 14 | 7 | -0.76 | 1.52 |
| Heliot Ramos | 17 | 14 | 8 | 57.1% | 1.52 | 3 | 1 | -0.08 | 1.44 |
Good to see that something’s going right for Raleigh this year.
So there’s about a win’s worth of difference between the best challenger this year (Langeliers) and the greatest victim of ABS (Wood). Take out catcher defense and that gap gets narrowed down to about six runs.
Looking at the leaderboard got me curious. Stewart leads the league in challenge runs and in successful challenges. But that’s the result of a spray-and-pray approach. Stewart has challenged 41 calls this year, which is the most in the league. He’s also tied for the league lead in unsuccessful hitter challenges. With no penalty for missing a challenge (at least not by this metric), quantity has a quality all its own.
The second-most successful catcher on the challenge leaderboard is Tyler Stephenson. And in contrast to Langeliers, he’s made five challenges from the batter’s box and won all of them. The only other hitter with as many challenges and a perfect record is Matt McLain, who — like Stephenson and Stewart — is a member of the Cincinnati Reds.
Obviously, some teams will have benefited from ABS more than others.
| Position | Batter | Pitcher+Catcher | Total | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team | Rev. | OvrTrn | Pct. | Runs | Rev. | OvrTrn | Pct. | Runs | Rev. | OvrTrn | Pct. | Runs |
| MIN | 141 | 67 | 47.5% | 12.0 | 187 | 114 | 61.0% | 21.5 | 328 | 181 | 55.2% | 33.6 |
| ATH | 107 | 53 | 49.5% | 9.0 | 168 | 104 | 61.9% | 21.9 | 275 | 157 | 57.1% | 31.0 |
| CIN | 125 | 67 | 53.6% | 13.5 | 138 | 99 | 71.7% | 16.4 | 263 | 166 | 63.1% | 29.9 |
| COL | 131 | 57 | 43.5% | 10.4 | 154 | 97 | 63.0% | 17.3 | 285 | 154 | 54.0% | 27.8 |
| LAA | 133 | 59 | 44.4% | 13.5 | 138 | 84 | 60.9% | 14.0 | 271 | 143 | 52.8% | 27.4 |
| MIA | 105 | 52 | 49.5% | 10.7 | 174 | 104 | 59.8% | 16.3 | 279 | 156 | 55.9% | 27.1 |
| NYY | 140 | 70 | 50.0% | 12.0 | 158 | 92 | 58.2% | 14.8 | 298 | 162 | 54.4% | 26.8 |
| NYM | 148 | 74 | 50.0% | 12.0 | 135 | 73 | 54.1% | 13.5 | 283 | 147 | 51.9% | 25.5 |
| KCR | 114 | 64 | 56.1% | 12.0 | 140 | 80 | 57.1% | 13.0 | 254 | 144 | 56.7% | 25.0 |
| BOS | 114 | 56 | 49.1% | 11.9 | 109 | 62 | 56.9% | 12.8 | 223 | 118 | 52.9% | 24.7 |
| BAL | 125 | 61 | 48.8% | 13.3 | 110 | 56 | 50.9% | 10.8 | 235 | 117 | 49.8% | 24.1 |
| DET | 119 | 64 | 53.8% | 11.8 | 113 | 76 | 67.3% | 12.2 | 232 | 140 | 60.3% | 24.1 |
| MIL | 86 | 38 | 44.2% | 7.0 | 184 | 100 | 54.3% | 16.8 | 270 | 138 | 51.1% | 23.7 |
| HOU | 132 | 75 | 56.8% | 12.9 | 141 | 72 | 51.1% | 10.6 | 273 | 147 | 53.8% | 23.5 |
| CHC | 115 | 56 | 48.7% | 11.1 | 118 | 79 | 66.9% | 12.3 | 233 | 135 | 57.9% | 23.4 |
| LAD | 121 | 65 | 53.7% | 13.4 | 101 | 61 | 60.4% | 9.9 | 222 | 126 | 56.8% | 23.3 |
| SEA | 119 | 52 | 43.7% | 11.1 | 112 | 66 | 58.9% | 11.9 | 231 | 118 | 51.1% | 23.1 |
| CHW | 108 | 49 | 45.4% | 8.3 | 189 | 87 | 46.0% | 14.5 | 297 | 136 | 45.8% | 22.7 |
| ATL | 101 | 38 | 37.6% | 8.8 | 124 | 75 | 60.5% | 13.8 | 225 | 113 | 50.2% | 22.6 |
| TEX | 102 | 51 | 50.0% | 10.7 | 113 | 72 | 63.7% | 11.6 | 215 | 123 | 57.2% | 22.3 |
| TOR | 112 | 56 | 50.0% | 9.3 | 134 | 76 | 56.7% | 12.7 | 246 | 132 | 53.7% | 22.0 |
| PHI | 133 | 66 | 49.6% | 10.0 | 104 | 67 | 64.4% | 11.9 | 237 | 133 | 56.1% | 21.9 |
| SFG | 117 | 57 | 48.7% | 11.4 | 118 | 62 | 52.5% | 9.9 | 235 | 119 | 50.6% | 21.3 |
| CLE | 116 | 46 | 39.7% | 8.8 | 131 | 67 | 51.1% | 12.1 | 247 | 113 | 45.7% | 20.9 |
| ARI | 100 | 55 | 55.0% | 9.0 | 109 | 73 | 67.0% | 11.5 | 209 | 128 | 61.2% | 20.5 |
| STL | 99 | 47 | 47.5% | 7.8 | 113 | 64 | 56.6% | 12.5 | 212 | 111 | 52.4% | 20.3 |
| WSN | 95 | 41 | 43.2% | 7.5 | 152 | 83 | 54.6% | 12.3 | 247 | 124 | 50.2% | 19.8 |
| PIT | 129 | 58 | 45.0% | 11.3 | 117 | 53 | 45.3% | 8.3 | 246 | 111 | 45.1% | 19.6 |
| SDP | 89 | 38 | 42.7% | 6.3 | 139 | 79 | 56.8% | 12.8 | 228 | 117 | 51.3% | 19.1 |
| TBR | 103 | 45 | 43.7% | 6.7 | 128 | 75 | 58.6% | 11.4 | 231 | 120 | 51.9% | 18.1 |
Again, the volume approach pays off. Across all positions, the Twins have initiated 30 more challenges than the second-place team. But the Reds not only have the highest challenge success rate in the league, they’re getting the most value per challenge out of any team.
| Team | Challenges | Win% | Runs | Runs/Challenge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CIN | 263 | 63.1% | 29.9 | 0.114 |
| ATH | 275 | 57.1% | 31.0 | 0.113 |
| BOS | 223 | 52.9% | 24.7 | 0.111 |
| LAD | 222 | 56.8% | 23.3 | 0.105 |
| TEX | 215 | 57.2% | 22.3 | 0.104 |
| DET | 232 | 60.3% | 24.1 | 0.104 |
| BAL | 235 | 49.8% | 24.1 | 0.102 |
| MIN | 328 | 55.2% | 33.6 | 0.102 |
| LAA | 271 | 52.8% | 27.4 | 0.101 |
| ATL | 225 | 50.2% | 22.6 | 0.100 |
| CHC | 233 | 57.9% | 23.4 | 0.100 |
| SEA | 231 | 51.1% | 23.1 | 0.100 |
| KCR | 254 | 56.7% | 25.0 | 0.098 |
| ARI | 209 | 61.2% | 20.5 | 0.098 |
| COL | 285 | 54.0% | 27.8 | 0.097 |
| MIA | 279 | 55.9% | 27.1 | 0.097 |
| STL | 212 | 52.4% | 20.3 | 0.096 |
| PHI | 237 | 56.1% | 21.9 | 0.092 |
| SFG | 235 | 50.6% | 21.3 | 0.091 |
| NYM | 283 | 51.9% | 25.5 | 0.090 |
| NYY | 298 | 54.4% | 26.8 | 0.090 |
| TOR | 246 | 53.7% | 22.0 | 0.090 |
| MIL | 270 | 51.1% | 23.7 | 0.088 |
| HOU | 273 | 53.8% | 23.5 | 0.086 |
| CLE | 247 | 45.7% | 20.9 | 0.085 |
| SDP | 228 | 51.3% | 19.1 | 0.084 |
| WSN | 247 | 50.2% | 19.8 | 0.080 |
| PIT | 246 | 45.1% | 19.6 | 0.080 |
| TBR | 231 | 51.9% | 18.1 | 0.078 |
| CHW | 297 | 45.8% | 22.7 | 0.077 |
The margins, as you can see, are small. The Reds are one one-thousandth of a run per challenge better than the A’s, and just 0.037 runs per challenge better than the last-place White Sox. That comes to one additional win every 270 challenges; at the current league-average challenge rate, that’s a difference of an extra win and a quarter over a 162-game season.
Here’s a graph of the relationship between total challenges and runs earned from challenges, by team. It’s called “Total Challenges vs. Runs, by Team.”
There’s a strong correlation between number of challenges and runs won from challenges.
The correlation between challenge success rate and challenge runs is still strong, but not as much as the raw challenge figure. Which makes sense, considering the lack of penalties for an unsuccessful challenge. But you can see the teams that have benefited the most from their challenges are in the middle of the pack in success rate.
The Reds are way over there on the right side of the chart with their 63.1% challenge win rate. Of the top 11 teams in challenge runs, everyone but Cincinnati is within one standard deviation of the league-average success rate.
Given the data we have here, an extra 2.88% of challenge success rate leads to one additional run from challenges. At the same time, every 11.6 challenges — successful or otherwise — correlates to an additional run.
It looks like teams, on the aggregate, could stand to be more aggressive. We know that’s true across plenty of situations within the game: Baserunning, manager challenges, using the backup catcher. An optimal strategy would occasionally leave a manager facing a serious downside; you don’t want to have rallies stifled by losing baserunners, or be forced to use the emergency catcher.
But while prioritizing avoidance of disaster minimizes the number of awkward postgame press conference questions, it might not be the best guiding principle for winning baseball games.
Ultimately, the effects of ABS challenges are minuscule on the whole; the best and worst teams, let alone players, are separated by little more than a run. But every edge counts. It’s time to loosen the reins.
Michael is a writer at FanGraphs. Previously, he was a staff writer at The Ringer and D1Baseball, and his work has appeared at Grantland, Baseball Prospectus, The Atlantic, ESPN.com, and various ill-remembered Phillies blogs. Follow him on Twitter, if you must, @MichaelBaumann.
Kind of surprising to see that Soto only has 16 challenges. I know he’s missed some time, but he was widely expected to be the biggest beneficiary of ABS before the season started.
I have a feeling all these “ABS Challenge” articles are going to seem quaint in 5 years when MLB simply has ABS call every pitch.
The chances you see a true ABS on every pitch with no umpire and no challenges is so minuscule as to be essentially zero.I would bet good money the challenge system as it currently exists sees very few changes in the next 5 years considering it took mlb 5 years just to test abs out and meticulously develop a system that is widely regarded as well-implemented and has no major detractors
I despise the current system. What are the reasons to keep the challenge system intact?
I think the way that some umpires have total control over what does and doesn’t constitute a challenge is going to move a lot more players to the side of doing it on every play.
Soto has been incredibly conservative with his challenges. At times it’s almost seemed like it messes with his routine to consider doing it, when his habit is to nod his head, slightly adjust his idea of the strike zone, and move on to the next pitch. It’s quite a contrast with his more hot-headed teammates, who tap the helmet in low-leverage situations and on obviously correct calls where they’re just mad about the outcome.
“I have a feeling all these “ABS Challenge” articles are going to seem quaint in 5 years when MLB simply has ABS call every pitch.”
I hope you are correct!
I hope you like walks.
Doumit did play some first base and OF, and was amazingly bad there too. he’s probably the worst defender in baseball history.
Dante Bichette and Gary Sheffield beg to differ
I offer up Wily Mo Pena. In his 2006 season with the Red Sox, despite hitting over .300 with an OPS around .850 he would ride the pine for stretches at a time because he was unplayable in the field and the DH position was taken.
Ryan Doumit’s framing numbers are still staggering every time I look back at them, especially the 2008 year.
The thing is, even at the time Doumit was known as a bad glove, good bat catcher on the grounds of the more easily observable things like blocking and throwing. The numbers bear that out – he was tied for 26th out of 38 in rSB among catchers with 450+ PA in 2008, and 32nd out of 38 in rGFP. That is certainly not a good catcher. But it was thought he hit well enough to smooth over that, as shown by his 3.3 bWAR in 2008.
But oh boy, was the receiving worse than we could have ever imagined. It is hard to find decent video of Doumit actually receiving behind the plate these days, but the little I can find is pretty rough. Just jerking the ball out of the zone on almost every ball low or outside.
Please, I need to watch these ‘highlights’
This video focuses on Doumit and has a few clips near the end of him receiving: https://youtu.be/jhGmyb_NGng?si=k6hI1hp1EcVMvbqJ&t=506
I’m sure you can find plenty of footage if you track down old archived games, but this was the best easy compilation I could find. I’ve tried to find more receiving videos, but most clips of Doumit’s receiving I can find are of him subsequently throwing down, which isn’t really conducive to observing framing.
Thanks!
7 of the top 10 teams in challenge efficiency are in the oldest half of average roster age, and 7 of the bottom 10 teams in challenge efficiency are in the youngest half of average roster age. Perhaps the older players simply have more experience with judging balls and strikes?
I really would’ve thought it’d cancel out since the younger players got experience with the system in the minors
It is genuinely stunning to see how bad Doumit’s defense was in 2008, thank you for bringing that to light alone
i thought the angels should be more aggressive when it comes to challenging calls but i guess they are already doing decent (although its more nolan “dookie” schanuel and less mike trout)
The lack of penalties (for missed challenges) is a fair point. I propose that the home plate ump should be allowed, nay encouraged, to issue a spanking to the offender.
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If there’s no penalty for failed challenges, I think you’ll always conclude that more challenges would be better. I agree though that is difficult to put a run value on failed challenges. Maybe we should rank teams by innings played with no available challenges?
I like the data presented in the article, but there are many more ways to look at ABS. I understand the writer is not trying to publish a book here, just a blog. But that should be acknowledged.
Challenges are a weird thing that create advantages and disadvantages that we didn’t have before. Two batters could face the same bad call on 3-2 pitches in the 9th inning but one gets a K and the other a BB because his team hadn’t wasted challenges. To a certain extent this has always been the case with framing, but the fact that you may not be able to challenge, or your team philosophy may dictate that you don’t, is another thing that makes judging who is the best at challenging basically impossible.
Team/coach decision making influences a lot of stats directly — base-stealing, swinging on 3-0, etc. — that we still manage to figure out.
This is true! Which is why sometimes it’s pretty rough to judge a player. If your third base coach keeps sending you into outs at the plate, your baserunning value plummets, but is it really your baserunning value that stinks, or your coaches decision making? Do we really “figure it out?” I’m not sure we do.
I was thinking along these lines too. The issue is this analysis says “challenge more, you earn more value”, but they can only fail two challenges a game, so there is a limit to what they are reasonably working with. I get frustrated when teams don’t use all their challenges every game – to me, there’s no excuse for that (we know umps miss more than a handful of pitches each game), though I understand wanting to wait to use them for an optimal moment. But its like saving your best reliever for a 1 run lead in the 9th – it may not happen, and don’t you want to win the game by using the best tools you have?
By focusing just on challenges made, you also ignore the cost of a challenge not made, that would have been successful had the challenge been made. I don’t know how to account for that either, but I do think there is a potential value loss there that has an impact.
False.. there is a fairly significant but currently unknown penalty for losing a challenge. Losing challenges makes it less likely a team will be able to challenge a reversible call later in the game. Watch a few games and this missed opportunity becomes apparent.
I know it’ll be more difficult to determine the run value of a failed challenge than a successful one, but I’d love to see an attempt at it in some future article at FanGraphs. I’m very curious to see how it would change the run value totals.
I totally agree that it would make more sense to adjust WPA instead of WAR, if only WPA was on a per-pitch basis
Based on the tables, the average challenge used appears to be worth about 0.095 runs. You could estimate that a failed challenge prior to the 9th, on average, costs about 1 later challenge (some challenges go unused, but some are used multiple times, the average number of challenges per team game is about 2.1). This would give an average value to a failed challenge (prior to the 9th) of -0.095 runs, which may be too harsh.
There are good and bad challenges. I have seen several times a catcher or hitter challenge a pitch in the 1st or 2nd inning with no one on base and the ball clearly either a strike or ball (depending on who is challenging).
A missed challenge combined with the expected value of an overturn would be a nice addition. Losing a challenge on say the first pitch of the game would be a major negative for an extreme example. Also a missed challenge when the ball was a mm or two off is different than say a missed challenge on a ball more than 3″ off.
Article idea – David Laurila asks the 2008 Pittsburgh Pirates pitching staff on their general thoughts about catcher framing
It would have to be off the record or anonymous sources, but that would be fantastic.
I can never find this, but Ian Snell was sent down to Indianapolis in 2009 and IIRC talked about how much nicer he found the vibe down there, specifically mentioning the catchers’ pitch framing.
Then the poor guy got traded to the Mariners, who with Kenji Johjima and Rob Johnson were the second-worst framing team of the time. Snell pitched for three years of the Framing Stats era and was on four of the ten all-time worst framing teams.
Remember the original moneyball era when the stats people said catcher defense barely matters? How wrong they were once we got better tech and data to prove it.
The scouts at the time said catcher defense matters, among other reasons given was pitch framing.
The scouts were right,, but had no proof. The metrics people were wrong.
When will this story be written?
bRef has McCann’s WAR at 5.5 in 2008, not 8.3. What am I missing?
fWAR vs bWAR – FanGraphs incorporates framing into their “blend” vs bRef, where it’s less part of the puzzle.
“Blend” might not be the right word, I’ve seen “flavor”, “varietal”, etc. YMMV, but you get the idea.
I watch a lot of Pirate gams and the numbers pass the eye test. It’s like the team didn’t have a plan for the ABS.
They don’t seem to have plans generally!
Covering challenges in WAR is interesting. From a batter perspective, they’re already getting credits for the change in walks, strikeouts and advantages in count from their wOBA.
But we definitely should be looking at this from a defensive perspective, especially catchers. The walks and Ks go to the pitcher stats, so this does make more sense to split out. Especially if I go to Savant’s dashboard, we see Oakland is up 25.3 runs defensively and Pittsburgh is only up 8.8. That’s a 16-run swing, showing catchers can probably be ±10 runs over a season.
Failed challenges is a more subtle factor, as they don’t impact the game directly, but make it more likely the team plays at a disadvantage later. We could try to figure out how the league hits with challenges available and no challenges available, and give a “cost” for wasting one, but that sounds more minuscule.
If you get your challenge right, you keep your challenge and therefore get to challenge more. So being right leads to more challenges — it may not necessarily be that “challenging more leads to greater success”, we’re likely seeing some impact from “getting challenges right leads to more challenges”.
This doesn’t take into account game situations—for example, the 9th inning, two strikes, runner on third. The analysis is incomplete without considering leverage. Please incorporate game situation and leverage into future studies.
When discussing the pegged estimate that Statcast currently uses for failed challenges (I think it’s -0.2 runs?), Tom Tango argued that game leverage is less relevant than inning leverage, and I think he has a point. If you are looking at this from a purely run-scoring standpoint, that is the correct analysis, IMO. Looking at it from a game-leverage standpoint leads to some weird edge cases — it’d basically say if you’re down 6 and it’s the bottom of the ninth, your chances of coming back are so small, it’s not worth it (even though the game is almost over).
The “cost” of a failed challenge is most likely a monotonically decreasing function on the number of game outs (for offense and defense, since it is the same pool of challenges) remaining and a modifier if it is your last challenge versus having one remaining. There’s likely fractional bits that I’m missing since number of PA remaining is not necessarily the same as the number of outs remaining, and that difference is not known at the time.
What I think is useful context is the likelihood that call is wrong based on historical data.
Looking at 2021-2026 inclusive, the range floats from 4-6% of ball calls being in the strike zone (per the Gameday zone) and 10-15% of strike calls not being in the strike zone. There’s definitely some meat on that bone still. But it also gives you context in how likely a missed call will happen per pitch taken.
I don’t understand how every team can have positive run value from challenges? Are you not subtracting the lost challenges from the defense? This has to be a zero sum game.
Baseball is definitionally a zero sum game. But the team that has a successful challenge against it didn’t “lose” the challenge.
Having watch a large majority of the Mets games this year it is shocking to see them rate as highly at this as they do. It seems to me like teams should be a lot better at this than they are.
2 outs and no on base, Simon for Pirates just challenged a 1-1 pitch and failed, using Pirates last challenge…. a really really bad challenge.
I am so tired of the challenge system. Just get them right the first time.
Imagine if the ABS were used initially, but set to randomly miss 10 calls per game and each team were charged with figuring out which 10 calls were missed. No one would go for that.
You need to be sure to have a person make up and manually input the random number seed for which calls are missed.
That will preserve the “human element” in when we get calls wrong, and appearantly, preserving the human element of officiating is more important than getting the calls right.
Ignoring the false equivalence, other automated strike zones disagree with ABS on ~15% to ~25% of fringe calls. That’s 3% to 5% of overall pitches, so not 10 a game, but it’s 5+ calls a game.
Idk how those systems match up to each other and to the human calls, but who is to say that ABS isn’t getting it wrong more often than the humans?
“It looks like teams, on the aggregate, could stand to be more aggressive. We know that’s true across plenty of situations within the game: Baserunning, manager challenges, using the backup catcher. An optimal strategy would occasionally leave a manager facing a serious downside; you don’t want to have rallies stifled by losing baserunners, or be forced to use the emergency catcher.
But while prioritizing avoidance of disaster minimizes the number of awkward postgame press conference questions, it might not be the best guiding principle for winning baseball games.”
Michael, how did you get into my brain and steal my long held beliefs? It starts with the absolutely awful job that 3rd base coaches do for fear of having one runner thrown out at the plate when the odds of scoring are about 90% and the next man up is hitting .180. Use of the backup catcher is more nuanced. I am on record as believing that the roster would be better utilized with a player like Kiner-Falefa who came up as a catcher and would be of added value. The risk of injury is very small in any event.
The word occasionally describes the problem exactly. I am quite certain that the people here at Fangraphs where everybody has a good handle on the percentages that are intrinsic to the game must be as mystified as I am that these poor percentage situations are handled the way they are.
Continuous Request: for tables like those in the article, can we please make them sortable by clicking on the header?
Maybe a Fangraphs rule: for tables of 10 (15?) or more lines, make them sortable? Am I being too picky?
Wait. Maybe I missed it in the article, but what is the equation that estimates runs from ABS challenges? Is it based on base situation and number of outs, and outcome of the AB? In other words, a won challenge that leads to a HR should be worth more than a won challenge that ends up as a strikeout.
I imagine that opportunity cost can be estimated based on a challenge win giving you another chance for a challenge win, whereas a lost challenge would prevent further challenges. In other words, if a won challenge is worth 0.1 runs, a win giving you another challenge would result in a potential value of 0.1 runs x % chance of success for the next challenge. And a lost challenge removes that chance, so subtract 0.1 runs x % chance of success for the challenge you cannot take (on average). This would likely be further based on actual challenges per game for each team… a team that challenges more and loses would take a bigger hit on potential challenge runs than a team that challenges less often.