Thursday occasioned the first Major League Baseball game of the 2025 season. To be sure, it was an exhibition of the spring-training variety between the Chicago Cubs and reigning-champion Los Angeles Dodgers (CHC-LAD GameTracker), but it’s still actual baseball. Most notably, that game brought us for the first time ever use of the automated ball-strike (ABS) system in an MLB game. Here’s a look at how it played out after Cody Poteet’s pitch to Max Muncy was called a ball:
As you may have picked up, Poteet appealed the ball ruling by tapping the top of the head. Review of the pitch indeed flipped it from a called ball to a strike, which means Poteet’s appeal was successful.
The ABS has been tested for years at various rungs of the minor leagues, and this spring MLB is testing it with big leaguers in various Grapefruit and Cactus League venues. What you see above is not the full ABS system, in which every pitch is judged a ball or strike by the Hawk-Eye camera. Instead, the pitcher, catcher, or batter is free to appeal a pitch they think was called incorrectly by the human plate umpire. At that point, the automated system rules on the pitch, and the appeal is either successful or unsuccessful. Under the appeal system, each team will be given a limited number of incorrect challenges per game. This approach constitutes something of a middle ground between a full ABS system and the traditional method of giving final say to human umps on every pitch.
If the ABS system passes muster this spring, then there’s a real chance it could be in use during the regular season at all 30 ballparks for the 2026 season. There’s certainly momentum in that direction, but the exact timeline is uncertain at this juncture.
Speaking of all this, our own R.J. Anderson recently took a deep dive into the ABS system that’s going to be a fixture this spring and at some point, presumably, a part of every MLB game.
