As far as trivia answers go, José Caballero will be intermediate-level: The first player to challenge an umpire under the league’s ABS system. A sicko-level trivia answer will be “Luis Arráez, Patrick Bailey, Matt Chapman, Cody Bellinger, Giancarlo Stanton, and Aaron Judge (twice).” Those are the first batters to fail to challenge missed calls in the ABS era, all of them coming before Caballero broke the seal in the fourth inning on Opening Night.
It’s Arráez’ concession that most stuck out to me. He was leading off the third inning, just trying to get on base with the Giants already down by five runs. He was ahead in the count 3-0, got a pitch that missed high by about an inch and a half, took it, and heard the familiar chimes of the 3-0 Autostrike.
(A reminder: that box you see in that broadcast clip is unofficial/wrong. For a short hitter like Arráez, it most likely overestimates how high his strike zone goes.)
In 3-0 counts, umpires have traditionally called anything remotely close a strike. You may have seen these niche-famous heat maps from FanGraphs 2012, showing the size of the called zone on 0-2 vs. 3-0 back then:
Batters historically just accepted this, relatively little argument and opprobrium after blown 3-0 calls. But they don’t need to accept it anymore. They can shame the umpires who call pitches like that strikes. They can force umpires to knock it off, or at least do their best to knock it off. Will they? Arráez failed the first test.
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Here’s my ballpark estimate: Home plate umpires have blown about 4 million calls in the century-and-a-quarter of AL/NL ball. Most were missed for one of two reasons:
For a long time many umpires considered it their right to express themselves with their zones, and cultivated their own idiosyncratic boundaries, like James Joyce making up his own grammar. They chose to be wrong.
But even with a clear standard in mind, umpiring is very hard. Getting every call right is impossible. They couldn’t help but be wrong.
QuesTec and its umpire-evaluating descendants mostly put a stop to the former, and with every increase in scrutiny and precision umpiring has become more consistent. (Just in the Statcast era—2015 onward—missed calls had dropped by 35 percent before challenging started.) ABS is a cure for the latter, correcting many of the mistakes that occur at the limits of umpiring capability.
But under which of these does the 3-0 autostrike fall? Most assume it’s something closer to umpire choice. In 2010, John Walsh described this phenomenon as “the compassionate umpire,” suggesting (perhaps tongue in cheek) that umpires, like almost everybody else, pull for the underdog. But in 2016, at Baseball Prospectus, Guy Molyneux disputed that reading. He proposed that umpires’ tendencies in extreme counts show Bayesian thinking: They expect to see strikes in 3-0 counts, so on close pitches they lean on their expectations (or, in Bayesian speak, their priors) to avoid making mistakes. Put another way:
Compassionate umpire: Expressing a preference (even if subconsciously)
Bayesian umpire: Helpless against the difficulty of the task
There’s a lot about ABS that has been fascinating in the first week, and a lot that will be fascinating after we have a few months of data. But a question I’ve been most curious about this year is whether the 3-0 autostrike will survive. I don’t want it to. I hate it. Makes no sense, bails out pitchers who don’t deserve it, penalizes batters for not swinging when they should absolutely not be swinging. But something survives even nuclear war, and I fear the 3-0 autostrike might be the cockroach of missed calls. So let’s do the early check:
