Rich LOVES MLB’s ABS Challenge System…Except for This ONE Thing

Rich is all the way in on baseball's ABS challenge system. It moves fast, it gives you an immediate answer, and it would have saved the sport at least one forfeit.

Old footage had floated through his feed, a Craig Kilborn highlight from a Dodgers game where the home plate umpire was so far off that Raul Mondesi got rung up on a strike two that nearly bounced in the left-handed batter's box. Tommy Lasorda came out to argue. It was ball night, so fans threw baseballs onto the field. The umpires called the game, the first Dodgers forfeit, Rich figured, since something like 1916.

"See, this is what the ABS is preventing," Rich said. Mondesi taps his helmet, the machine answers, everybody goes home. Somebody across the desk noted that what actually happened was way cooler. Fair.

What makes Rich crazy is umpires refusing the challenge because they decide the hitter took too long to ask. Julio Rodriguez tapped his helmet in Seattle the other night and was told he missed the window. Dan Wilson got ejected arguing it, on a night his old teammates were in the building to celebrate the Mariners' 50th anniversary.

The intent behind the timing rule is understandable. Nobody wants a hitter glancing into the dugout for permission, because the challenge is supposed to belong to the player on the field. "It's not like the Price Is Right where they're screaming at you to bid higher or lower," Rich said.

Except the dugout has a worse view than the hitter does, and there are no monitors down there anymore. "The Astros took care of the monitor. You took care of the Apple watches, and my Yankees probably took care of something else, too." A second or two of delay is not a conspiracy, and some umpires take forever to even say the word strike. "They're not using common sense. And it's infuriating."

The other half of his gripe runs the opposite direction, because plenty of hitters are simply bad at this. Jazz Chisholm gets singled out by name. Rich thinks Aaron Boone should ban him from challenging until his last at-bat, the same way Keith Olbermann once told a young Rich to pull back on the jokes.

That leads to the fix. If you challenge a ball that was at least an inch inside the zone, or a strike that was at least an inch outside it, you lose every remaining challenge for the rest of the game. Not the ones that clip the corner. The ones that are not close. "If you lose your challenge by an inch, you lose every remaining challenge," Rich said, and the umpire who got it right walks away clean.

The room did not accept the premise. One counter-argument held that a pitch a tenth of an inch inside the zone should not be a strike at all, that a ball needs to be half in on the black to count, that one bristle is not painting the corner.

Which brought up Isaiah Likely's toe. If most of the foot is in and the toenail is out, the receiver is out, and nobody is asking for the majority of the foot to decide it. A piece is a piece. The sideline is the sideline. The strike zone should work the same way. Or it shouldn't, depending on which side of the desk you sat on.

The last word was a bigger heresy. If ABS had existed for Greg Maddux, would anyone think he was that great? Go back and look at those strikes. Six inches off the corner.