Open this photo in gallery:
Umpire Ryan Additon watches as a call is challenged using MLB’s ABS challenge system during the third inning of a spring training baseball game between the Miami Marlins and the Houston Astros Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2026, in Jupiter, Fla. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)Jeff Roberson/The Associated Press
Major League Baseball is changing the rules – again. Will they make the game better? Or just open the door to further inhuman developments?
A new Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System will be in play now. The system makes it possible for players to challenge home-plate umpire calls by tapping their helmets. An automated review system known as Hawk-Eye tracking technology, courtesy communications megalith T-Mobile, then uses a player-specific strike zone to assess the “correct” call without delay, results displayed onscreen.
Teams will start with two of these challenges per game, but retain them if they succeed in overturning a butchered call. Only the pitcher, catcher, and batter can execute the helmet-tap objection, and the system is not available when position players are pitching. If a team has burned its two challenges during regulation play, it gets one more for every extra inning it plays.
There are a couple of other rule changes coming this year, but they’re paltry by comparison. There will be some enforcement of those hilariously inaccurate coaching boxes that are limed along the basepaths, also a closer eye on making contact with opposing players to draw obstruction calls. ABS is getting all the attention, though, because it seems like one more step on a slippery slope to everyone’s Terminator-level nightmare scenario: fully automated umpires with electronic strike zones.
Dodgers’ three-peat attempt, robot umpires headline new baseball season
Advocates say that the system, like video challenges in football or tennis, will be smoothly integrated features that ensure the right call is made. Purists object that the human element – including mouth-frothing managers freaking out at umps, or highly strung pitchers spitting in frustration on the mound – are romantic features of the game that will be missed. (To be sure, many occasions for those human rage-dramas will remain. That’s baseball.)
Both sides are right, of course, and both are wrong. Sure, ABS will correct a few otherwise blown ump calls. But it will also, by a small degree, reduce the human element in the sport. Challenges like this, made in the name of some notional perfectly correct call, make the game less playful. This erosion is especially egregious in a sport that embraces the incidence of error so fervently that it records them with punishing accuracy. Baseball is a human undertaking, messy and incomplete, not a computer program to generate lists of wins and losses.
What I dislike about the new rules, though, is that they’re technocratic. They add an extra layer of non-human gamification to the game. Players have to be tactical with their video challenges. Risk and reward are deployed, yes, but under the guise of “getting it right.” According to the technology, that is, without which – together with its corporate telecommunications conglomerate – the game is no longer possible.
Hence the anxiety and even alarm the change is arousing in some fans. If the electronic ump suggests deferral to superior non-human judgment, why not replace the human umps altogether? The new rule-regime offers not greater freedom within constraint – the aim of all good rules – but rather constraint imposed for a minute shred of tactical advantage. Mere correctness is elevated over imperfect fun: never a recipe for happiness.
More deeply, gamification of this sort is contrary to the intrinsic value of games. We know this when tactical considerations enter non-game arenas like relationships or education – or, alas, electoral politics and war. Games critique life by their artificial status; they should not be made more like life, any more than life should be reduced to gaming a system.
Open this photo in gallery:
Steven Kwan of the Cleveland Guardians strikes out as the umpire’s call was confirmed with ABS during the Guardians’ game against the Seattle Mariners at T-Mobile Park on Wednesday in Seattle.Steph Chambers/Getty Images
Games are endlessly varied, but they have some common properties. The philosopher Bernard Suits defined them this way: “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” The rules of any game provide constraints. They shape the obstacles, and hence the interest we will take in overcoming them – or, as it may be, watching talented others do so, singly and in groups, representing colleges, cities, and nations.
The tactical goals within a game – scoring more points than the other team, say, using some form of equipment like a ball or puck – have to make strategic sense. They must allow certain means, but crucially not all, to the ends of the game – which is typically, though not always, winning the contest.
Rules curtail crude efficiency and brute force, even as they satisfy what Suits called the “lusory attitude” of valuing play for its own sake. Game-forms are open to free imagination: you make a game of anything, provided you have willing rule-followers with the right attitude.
Games are thus more than their rules or the set of moves possible within those rules. Games are made of players, and fans – also owners and sponsors – governed by a shared spirit. The best games honour not just rules but norms, those “unwritten rules” or let’s call them spiritual features that make any game special. Fair play and sportsmanship are typically among these, but guile and deception may also be valued. Complex codes of civility, team loyalty, or toughness hover over play. Proper lusory attitude means that some expectations of the game do not need to be, indeed cannot be, set out by the explicit rules.
Even non-cricketers know what it means when something is not cricket, for example. But it takes a true hockey fan to know that, however done by the book, three-on-three overtime to decide a championship game is not hockey. And tooth-loosening fisticuffs are fully within genuine rink spirit – in fact are demanded sometimes, as when, say, a dirty hit takes out your captain. Failure in these norms is worse than a loss; it’s a matter of shame.
For baseball’s tallest hitters, robo-umps should bring consistency to a tricky strike zone
We all know baseball is a peculiar game. Play is executed without territorial advantage and absent a dominating clock. The irregular field is an essay in eccentricity, with its neighbourhood-hemmed outfields and idiosyncratic foul territory. Even the central geometry of the diamond exhibits contingency.
The conventional distance between home plate and first base, 90 feet, can be paced out on a famous street corner in Hoboken, N.J, once the site of the Elysian Fields ballpark. But the distance is not actually written in stone. Instead, that prescribed span is the best kind of ludic rule: fixed but artificial, contingent but not arbitrary.
The distance works because the physics of ground balls, fielding throws, running humans, and stretching trappers all contrive a thrilling miniature drama maybe a dozen times a game. It works because it plays.
Blame and responsibility are everywhere here: hit or error, passed ball or wild pitch. Players are haunted by the precise statistical record of their outfield muffs and batter’s-box whiffs. The game is constructed of these little hinge points, all animated by ghostly but pervasive presence, the spirit of the game.
Open this photo in gallery:
Managers will still find ways to argue with officials, as Chicago Cubs manager Lou Piniella did here in a 2008 game, but that dynamic has been altered with the introduction of the ABS system to MLB this season.Charles Rex Arbogast/The Associated Press
Sporting spirits are fickle, though, and rightly so. Sometimes, despite everything, injustice prevails and the better team loses. Frustration, bad luck, and inconsistency are part of a game’s life lessons, too.
More than most sports, baseball’s meaning overflows mere game–play, the catalogue of wins and losses. It’s all the angular quirks, odd traditions, and weepy game-of-catch dad-vibes; also literary resonances and poetic-pastoral associations. Every tweak of the rules is thus a challenge to somebody’s idea of baseball’s Edenic propriety, if not their entire value-system.
If you meddle with it, they will come – with their objections, their crankiness, their back-in-my-day nostalgia. Would Bart Giamatti welcome ABS to paradise? Will Donald Hall turn in his New Hampshire grave every time a player taps his helmet in protest over a painted-corner strike?
Rules must stand in service of these spectral presences: the interest, the larger narrative of play, that special calmness interrupted by bursts of excitement. Baseball has a tradition as well as a future. Changes made in the name of the game must serve its lusory integrity. (Put that on a t-shirt, sports fans!)
Rise of the robot referees
The weakest argument in favour of the new ABS system is that, like all incursions of technology into daily life, it is “inevitable.” This wicked presumption is entrenched deeply in every aspect of what we must recognize as techno-capitalism. We are forever being told that changes are coming whether we like it or not, or worse, are here already and cannot be reversed; and so we must get on board or be left behind.
This bogus doctrine of technological inevitability is the big lie of modern life. It is also the most dangerous, because it surrenders both individual agency and collective interest to machine dominance. Nothing is inevitable until we make it so. The apparently lazy game of baseball has much to teach about a deeper, more human wisdom that won’t be settled by an electronic eye.
Players can challenge a call now, and that may help them win. Okay. But the biggest challenge is still the one that brought us all to the park in the first place, that one that wins and losses alone cannot answer. Why do we play this game? Or any game? You won’t find the answer to that question in the rule book, this year or any other. You just know you want to go to the park.
