Major League Baseball announced that robot umpires will be part of the 2026 season. The league will implement the Automated Ball Strike (ABS) Challenge System.
ABS coming full time
The Joint Competition Committee voted to use the system starting next season.
“The previous rule changes that have been adopted by the Joint Competition Committee have had staying power and created momentum for the game,” Rob Manfred, MLB Commissioner, said in a statement. “We used the same process with ABS that started with listening to fans, conducting extensive testing at the Minor League level, and trying at every step to make the game better.”
That system allows players to challenge ball and strike calls from home plate umpires.
“It’s a great move overall for Major League Baseball, and I think something that they’d signaled for a while, that they were willing to do, so long as they felt like they had support from the fans and the players, and to an extent, the umpires as well,” Scott Bush, CEO of the Society for American Baseball Research, told Straight Arrow News.
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Many view this move as a compromise between preserving the human element of umpires and automating the game.
“I have mixed feelings about it,” Dale Scott, an MLB umpire for 31 years, told Straight Arrow News. “The umpire staff is accurate about 98% give or take, you know, a tenth of a point here or there on all pitches for the entire year. The problem is you miss a pitch in a crucial situation, and that thing is amplified a million times.”
Scott said the current group of MLB umpires was hesitant at first but have grown into the idea, especially because critics have grown louder.
“A lot of the guys are saying, now, okay, you know what, we can’t fight city hall, so to speak,” Scott said. “You can’t fight technology. Bring it on, and now you can yell at the machine and leave me alone.”
The implementation of ABS marks the latest technological advancement in the game.
Instant replay was introduced in 2008 and expanded in 2014.
“The bottom line is, you can’t outrun technology,” Scott said. “We have people watching games on 85-inch screens and super high definition, billion-pixel whatever, and you have an umpire who has to make a call on something one time in real time.”
The new system will be available to teams during the regular season and postseason next year.
How it works
Each team will get two challenges to start each game. If a challenge is successful, they get to keep it. If the challenge fails, the team will lose it.
If games go to extra innings, teams without a challenge will get a new one for each extra inning.
Only three people on the field can request a challenge using ABS: the pitcher, the hitter and the catcher. Team managers cannot initiate an ABS challenge.
Those players call for a challenge by tapping the top of their hat or helmet.
Once a call is challenged, the Hawk-Eye technology instantaneously transmits the location of the ball relative to the strike zone. That result is immediately displayed on the videoboard for fans in attendance and broadcast to fans at home.
“You’re talking about 10 to 15 seconds,” Bush said. “It’s not something that anyone’s really going to notice and certainly isn’t going to amount to a meaningful amount of time over an entire game.”
Those challenges took an average of 13.8 seconds during testing.
Testing it out
A full ABS was first used in the independent Atlantic League in 2019. The challenge system debuted in the Florida State League in 2022.
MLB introduced both systems to the Triple-A level during the 2023 and 2024 seasons, before narrowing them down to just the challenge system.
Major league players got their first taste during Spring Training this year, and fans really got a good look at it during the 2025 MLB All-Star Game.
“Major League Baseball did a great job of testing this out,” Bush said.
Effect on the game
“The ABS system will have unintended consequences,” Scott said. “We’re not sure what they are yet.”
The data shows that adding additional time to a game won’t significantly impact the addition of ABS, but could it impact big moments?
On Oct. 28, 2012, Sergio Romo of the San Francisco Giants struck out Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers with a fastball on the outside corner to win the World Series. The Giants and their fans went wild, and fans at home got to witness a very exciting moment.
However, what if Cabrera could have challenged that strike call? Would it take away from the moment?
“There’s always the chance, but at the same time, a big part of this is in a high leverage moment, you really do want to make sure that the call is correct, and any umpire is going to support that,” Bush said.
Could baseball one day move to total ABS without the human umpires?
“It doesn’t seem like that’s something that the players are particularly interested in today,” Bush said. “I think if we didn’t have a great group of ball strike umpires currently within Major League Baseball, I think that maybe the players would feel differently. But Major League Baseball is a really good job of training umpires, and they currently have some really great ball strike umpires.”
