Robot umpires are officially knocking on the door of MLB.
Commissioner Rob Manfred told The Athletic’s Evan Drellich on Wednesday that the league will test an automated ball-strike challenge system at spring training in 2025, with the hope the system can be implemented in the regular season in 2026.
The system will reportedly give give teams two challenges per game, retaining them when they are correct. Not every spring training ballpark will reportedly have the ABS cameras, but all teams will have the opportunity to play with it.
From The Athletic:
“I think we will have a spring training ABS test that will provide a meaningful opportunity for all major-league players to see what the challenge system will look like,” Manfred said. “From my perspective, there’s two sides to that test: It’s what clubs think about it, and also, what do the players think about it? And we’re gonna have to sort through both of those.”
MLB has experimented with ABS systems in the minor leagues going back to 2019, in two formats. Some games have seen the robo umps used to call every pitch, while others have used the challenge system about to hit spring training.
The challenge system was used full-time in Triple-A, and you can see it used to end a game here:
At one point last year, MLB said teams had a 47% success rate with challenges.
Robo umps once felt like a radical change for MLB, but they’ve become something of an inevitably because of how MLB has approached them. Because they’ve been around the minor leagues for years, an enormous chunk of current major leaguers already have experience with the system.
It has been a very slow transition for the league, but it appears to almost be over. There will almost certainly be grumbles with the system (not every pitch that is technically a strike looks like a strike, and the same with balls), but many fans will take it over a human element that can be infuriating at times.