Are players challenging enough ABS calls? It's a work in progress

The first official challenge of the ABS era came from a Yankees batter on Opening Night, when José Caballero challenged a Logan Webb called strike in the fourth inning. He was wrong, but it also shouldn’t have been Caballero who ended up being the answer to the trivia question.

It should have been Aaron Judge, who took a first-inning first pitch above the zone for a called strike, leading to the first of his four strikeouts. The very next inning, Judge took another pitch in nearly the same spot. Also high. Also a called strike. Also not challenged.

In the second game of the season, Judge didn't hesitate, correctly challenging a ball low, turning a 1-1 count into 2-0. A few pitches later, he blasted a full-count homer, breaking a scoreless tie.

A few days later in Seattle, the Yankees pounced. Five times they challenged. Five times they were right, tied for the most of any batting team so far this season. Twice – once from Caballero, and once from Giancarlo Stanton – a strikeout was overturned and the batter ended up reaching base. While they still ended up losing the game, it’s an incredibly valuable tool, if used right.

If it’s used right, being the operative words. Entering play Tuesday, two teams (Colorado and St. Louis) still haven’t had their hitters make a single challenge yet. It can go the other way, too; on March 28, the Braves lost both of their challenges for the entire game in the first inning.

We all know that every challengeable pitch won’t get the head-tap. That much was made true in looks at Triple-A last year and Spring Training this year, and for some obvious reasons, too. Some pitches are simply too borderline to risk it, because it’s not clear you’ll be right. Some are in the wrong spot in the game, where the leverage is so low that it’s not worth the effort. Some batters, we assume, simply don’t have the green light to do so in ways that other batters in their lineup do.

It’s a new world, and we’re all getting used to it.

But if we’ve learned anything through the first week of “doing this for real,” aside from, “Hey, it’s working pretty smoothly overall, exactly as intended, and it’s also surprisingly fun,” it’s this: Players are probably not being aggressive enough with challenges. They’re leaving too much value on the table. It’s a learning process for all of us. That includes the players. ("We’re all still trying to get a good gauge for it,” said Philadelphia’s Brandon Marsh.) They’re starting to figure that out, too. Just 6% of takes on the edges have been challenged, down slightly from the 7% we saw in Triple-A last year.

"I'd like to see us finish the game with no challenges left," said Padres manager Craig Stammen to the San Diego Union-Tribune. "Or at least challenge a little bit more."

A’s manager Mark Kotsay had some thoughts on the matter after his players didn’t challenge once in Toronto on March 27 – a game they lost 3-2.

“As we get into it, we’re going to understand it better and the timing. Players have freedom to challenge. Yesterday, there was an actual pitch we talk about having leverage, which was the [Nick] Kurtz 3-2 pitch,” he told MLB.com’s Martin Gallegos. "For Nick, he was 50-50 on it. It would have resulted in a walk, which would have been key for us that inning. That’s the learning curve. The difficult part is that bottom of the zone when [Kevin] Gausman is painting. Taking that chance early and losing a challenge can be tough."

Three days later, Kurtz didn't make the same mistake, turning a successful challenge into an eventual walk.

In another early game, in a 6-6 tie in the eighth, the Angels would have had the third strike and third out of the inning, but didn’t challenge a borderline pitch to Isaac Paredes. On the very next pitch, he doubled in the go-ahead runs.

Or consider this moment, in Seattle’s first game of the season. It’s the bottom of the eighth inning, the Mariners are down 5-4, and Cal Raleigh is up with a 2-2 count. They still have both challenges remaining, having not yet tried one, so any worries about leverage or saving a challenge for the late innings ought to be out the window at this point, and nothing is more valuable than making sure your most dangerous hitter stays at the plate.

With the fifth pitch, Cleveland’s Erik Sabrowski put a slider just outside the plate. Not by much, to be fair; just an inch outside. But outside nonetheless, while still being called as the third strike. For the entirety of baseball history to this point, Raleigh could do nothing about that. This time, he could, but he didn’t, walking back to the dugout instead of using the head tap that would have made it a full count, a situation where he has a career .450 on-base percentage. It’s not that it should have been so obvious he was right; surely it’s far easier for us watching on TV. It’s that the situation demanded it.

The Mariners never did use a challenge in the game. They never scored again, either, losing 6-4.

“Looking back, yeah, I should’ve done it,” Raleigh said. “I didn’t think it was that far off. It was off. But it is what it is. You learn from it. I’m sure we’ll get more accustomed to it as the year goes on.”

He’s right, on all counts. It wasn’t that far off, and he should have done it, and he (and everyone else) will get more accustomed to it as the year goes on. It’s not just about Raleigh, anyway. It’s everyone. Through Monday, the data is pretty telling:

• 227 challenges in 62 games – an average of just 3.7 per game
• 22 times, a team exhausted both challenges (before extras), but
• … only four times did that happen in the first five innings
• 18 times, a team never challenged at all
• 55 times, a ninth-inning missed call went unchallenged
• 12 times, a full-count miss went unchallenged

Again: the expectation is not 100% perfect challenging, for all the reasons noted above and simply the fact that it’s really hard to do this – as indicated by the 50/50 overturn rate, meaning that even when players are confident enough to challenge, they’re still only right half the time.

One of those full-count non-challenges, for example, was Kevin McGonigle’s third day in the Majors, coming in the second inning with the bases empty. We can at least understand why he may not have been willing or empowered to risk one that early in the game, even if the value proposition for turning a strikeout into a walk is large.

But it is, because of this:

• A challenge won is worth +0.2 runs, on average (situationally dependent)
• A challenge lost costs you nothing – other than the opportunity cost of having it available later

Not having one available if you need it in a big spot isn’t nothing, to be sure. Yet so far, that’s hardly happened – just those four times.

But also, consider those 55 times a ninth-inning call went unremarked upon. It’s the baseball version of “you can’t take it with you,” essentially. A challenge gained is more valuable than a challenge lost is damaging, is the point, particularly when you have both remaining. They’re not equal.

As MLB’s Senior Data Scientist Tom Tango has explained it, there’s not just a small difference in doing this in high-leverage situations. There’s a huge one:

“On average, an overturn run for a random bases empty situation is 0.08 runs … On average, an overturn run for a random bases loaded situation is 0.60 runs. In other words, you can get over SEVEN times the payoff on a flipped 3-2 pitch as you would from flipping a first pitch. When you have that kind of a payoff, you need to be very careful on challenging first pitches and very aggressive on challenging 3-2 pitches.”

It’s why ultimately, while ABS win-loss rate is the most easily accessible metric for most, it’s also flawed in that it accounts only for challenges made. (That is: you could be 100% right if you only ever challenged the most obvious, egregious misses … but you’d leave a ton of value on the table, too.) That’s what current and forthcoming Statcast metrics are designed to account for.

So what’s happening here? Mostly a normal settling-in pattern, we think, and also just increasing evidence of what we already knew, which is that it’s really difficult for the human eye to judge pitch location – players more so than umpires. But, we also theorize it’s because of something Raleigh vocalized perfectly.

“We have a lot of good guys on this team, and nobody wants to be selfish,” Raleigh said.

Stars pride themselves on being good teammates, just one of the guys. But in this case, they should be selfish; keeping Raleigh, or Judge, or another top hitter at the plate is more valuable than the eighth hitter in the lineup. It might not be popular, but it’s true.

“Obviously,” manager Aaron Boone said of Judge, “[the challenge] turned into making it a real leverage-heavy at-bat for him, and he hit a moonshot.”

Obviously. Or -- perhaps not yet. We're all learning how this works best. So, too, are the players.