Former Umps Watch the ABS Take Over and It's Getting Ugly

The automated ball-strike system is here, and the people who spent their entire careers making those calls? They're watching it unfold with a mixture of sympathy and pain. Five recently retired umpires with a combined 161 years of big league experience have been talking, and the message is clear: something has fundamentally shifted about what counts as a strike, and nobody can quite pin down why.

The Strike Zone Is No Longer What It Used To Be

Gary Darling, a longtime former ump, doesn't mince words. "The strike zone has never been an exact science," he said. "They're flipping pitches that are missing by a tenth of an inch, in a system that's not exact anyway." He's heard from guys still working the plate, and some of them would rather the computer call everything. At least then they wouldn't be caught in this gray zone where the new standard doesn't match the old one.

Joe West, who umpired more games than anyone in MLB history, is blunt about it: "My problem is that they haven't proven it's as accurate as they say it is." Jim Joyce, who's worked three World Series and three All-Star games, has talked to active umps around the league. They all feel the same thing. "They feel the strike zone has changed," Joyce said.

MLB pushes back, of course. The league says years of testing went into this thing, and the early data shows umpire accuracy is up to 93.5 percent, a 0.9 percent jump from last year. That's a record, according to an MLB spokesperson.

The Math Doesn't Work at the Edges

Here's where it gets ridiculous. The new system measures balls and strikes from a two-dimensional plane at the middle of home plate. The old way was three-dimensional, starting where the ball crossed at the front of the plate. Now the top of the zone is 53.5 percent of a player's height, and the bottom is 27 percent. Former ump Brian Gorman nails the problem: "If you can figure out where 53.5 percent of my height is on my chest, good luck. I don't know what your height is, and I don't know how to do the math."

Dale Scott gets it too. The umps are adjusting to what the machine will call a strike, trying not to get overturned. "The problem is when you're talking about 1/10th of an inch, being close doesn't really help," he said. Joe West wraps it up perfectly: "I believe that umpires have their specific little strike zones that may be an inch off here or an inch off there. But I think the biggest thing is the consistency of the guy behind the plate. To my knowledge, the system hasn't been proven perfect."

Meanwhile, on Sunday, CB Bucknor got publicly humiliated on back-to-back strike three calls on Eugenio Suárez. Both times overturned. Both times, he emphatically rang him up before the computer said otherwise. That's the new normal.

This article was created with AI assistance and reviewed by Seattle On Tap editorial staff. Always verify information with official team sources.