In poker, there are good losses and bad losses. A good loss can befall the best players, even when playing a hand that has a high probability of winning. There are also such things as “bad beats” — playing the hand you’re dealt even when it has little chance of winning, or folding a hand that usually wins.
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The Los Angeles Dodgers ran out of ABS challenges in their 3-2 loss to the Miami Marlins on April 29 when Alex Call challenged, and lost, a 2-and-2 strike thrown by Marlins pitcher Sandy Alcantara in the sixth inning.
Was it a bad beat? It depends on who you ask.
One month into MLB‘s first attempt at allowing human umpires to be overturned by a computer, it is tempting to declare winners and losers. Which teams are the best at challenging, and which are the worst? Which catchers, hitters, and pitchers, have the best and worst judgment?
Those answers are harder to discern than the surface-level data suggests. The Alex Call situation perfectly illustrates why.
The Dodgers successfully challenged balls and strikes at a 57 percent rate. They’re in the middle of the pack, with the Arizona Diamondbacks (63 percent) at the top and the Washington Nationals (39 percent) at the bottom.
These surface-level numbers reveal something. But they do not offer essential context about good beats vs. bad beats, or bad calls that went unchallenged. On the macro level, this data does not answer the question of who has mastered the ABS challenge system.
Precise answers can get thorny on the micro level, too.
For example, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts struggled to defend Call’s sixth-inning challenge.
“Obviously, when you look back, it wasn’t a good challenge,” Roberts said. “It’s hard to have one challenge left in the fourth inning … and you put yourself behind the eight ball. You know, if you’re gonna challenge, and it was a (high) leverage-ish spot, as far as that importance but … you like to think you’re gonna get those right.”
Call had fewer regrets.
“I know we only had one (challenge) left,” the 31-year-old outfielder told Newsweek Sports. “You’ve got to use your challenges. I was about 90 percent (sure) on that one. Having the ball just be touching (the strike zone) by one-sixteenth of an inch is a win, as far as validating my eyes. Obviously you want it to be a ball, and it sucks losing the challenge and being down for the game, but a 3-1 count there (instead of 2-and-2) — it could be a different story.”
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When even a player and manager on the same team are not in lockstep about whether a challenge was good or bad, that suggests room for reasonable disagreement exists around how to work the system.
Some factors a player must consider besides the location of the pitch itself:
• The number of challenges remaining (one or two)
• The game state (inning, runners on base, ball-strike count, score)
• The batter, pitcher, or catcher’s own knowledge of the strike zone
• The umpire’s accuracy (within the game, in general, and/or a specific portion of the strike zone)
• The movement of the pitch (did it move early — making it less likely to clip the border of the strike zone — or late?)
Each of these points helps determine whether a lost challenge constitutes a “good beat” or a “bad beat.”
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A team that overturns 100 percent of its challenges might not be challenging enough. A team that loses a high percentage of challenges might not be leaving any useful challenges on the table. That’s why the raw percentage of successful challenges tells an incomplete story.
There’s also an element of luck. The ABS system has a margin for error of one-sixth of an inch. The pitch Call challenged might have been within that margin, as he suggested.
Still, Call couldn’t know the Dodgers would not want to challenge any pitches after he failed to overturn Alcantara’s 2-and-1 pitch in the sixth inning. Maybe he got lucky. Or maybe he did a good job assessing the probabilities in the specific situation.
The difference between a good challenge and a bad challenge, ironically, is a lot like the strike zone in the era before ABS: it’s truly in the eye of the beholder.
For more MLB news, visit Newsweek Sports.
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