BY DAN GLICKMAN
In the second inning of Friday’s record-setting game between the Rochester Red Wings and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, something happened to 2023 Cy Young Award winner Gerrit Cole for the first time: a strike he threw was overturned and changed to a ball.
Red Wings center fielder Alex Call received an 88.8 MPH cutter from the rehabbing Yankee righty with one out in the second. On the field, home plate umpire Anthony Perez called the pitch a strike, but Call challenged the result. A few seconds later, a graphic appeared on the scoreboard showing the pitch in motion, landing just high of the strike zone for a ball. What would have been a 0-1 count was instead a 1-0 count.
VIEW MORE PHOTOS FROM JOE TERRITO.
Umpire calls this Gerrit Cole pitch a strike and the battered challenged. Call was changed to a ball pic.twitter.com/GFj07Qck2E
— Jomboy Media (@JomboyMedia) June 14, 2024
While the pitch didn’t change the result of the at-bat, as Call later popped out to Scranton third baseman Oswald Peraza for the inning’s second out, it still would have been unfamiliar to Cole.
“It was my first experience with it; it was interesting,” said Cole.
Major League Baseball has yet to implement the Automated Balls and Strikes system, or ABS. Often colloquially called “robo-umps”, the system can, in theory, call most balls and strikes and has been in place in AAA since last season in two formats: a completely automated form on Tuesdays through Thursdays and a “challenge” format on Fridays through Sundays. The challenge system is just that: an opportunity for batters, pitchers, or the catcher to request that the ABS system look at an umpire’s call.
While Cole found his first brush with an ABS challenge interesting, that didn’t mean he had no problem with it—at least, as it currently stands.
Which is perhaps not surprising, as Cole has never been one to remain silent as Major League Baseball has changed its rules in recent years. A former member of the the Major League Baseball Player Association’s Executive Council, Cole previously has been outspoken about baseball’s rule changes involving the use of sticky substances and took issue with MLB’s dismissal of concerns about how the pitch clock could be affecting injury rates while expressing frustrations with the combative nature of the disagreement.
“I’m not sure if I agreed with the call,” he said. “The challenge system, from some of the feedback that I’ve been getting, the edges are really tight, like the top and bottom is very arbitrary.”
Still, he thinks it could have potential once tested and adjusted enough.
“Look, we’re all trying, MLB is trying to make the game better, and so we have the tool and I think it’s just about figuring out how we’re going to use them in the future,” he said. “But it’s a nice little wrinkle.”
When ABS comes to MLB is up in the air. In May, commissioner Rob Manfred told Evan Drellich of The Athletic that a “growing consensus” was that the challenge format is the form that ABS would take in the big leagues, at least to start. However, he thought any such arrival was unlikely in 2025.
If and when it does arrive, Gerrit Cole’s encounter with the challenge system in Rochester could prove just the first of many.
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