To Commissioner Rob Manfred and the leadership of Major League Baseball,

I’m writing this as someone who loves baseball not just as a sport, but as an institution.

And that distinction matters.

Because baseball is not supposed to be just another product to be optimized, streamlined, cleaned up, sped up, and repackaged for people whose attention span can’t survive a seven-pitch at-bat. Baseball has always been something more than that. It has texture. It has rhythm. It has tension. It has nuance. It has arguments. It has imperfections. It has humanity. And whether the league fully appreciates it or not, that humanity is not some outdated bug in the system. It is a huge part of what made generations of people fall in love with the game in the first place.

Which is exactly why the continued push toward the ABS challenge system for balls and strikes is so troubling.

I understand the sales pitch. Accuracy. Efficiency. Consistency. Those words always sound great in a boardroom, in a press release, or on a PowerPoint slide. But baseball has never been just a technical problem waiting to be solved. It is a living thing. A sport built on feel, judgment, adjustment, psychology, and the constant push and pull between pitcher, catcher, hitter, and umpire.

The strike zone is part of that living fabric.

It has never been just some digital box on a screen. Catchers learn how to frame. Pitchers learn how to work the edges. Hitters adjust to how a zone is being called that day. Umpires establish the tone and flow of a game. That back and forth is not some unfortunate design flaw in baseball that needs to be corrected by software. That is baseball.

And just as importantly, the strike zone is three-dimensional.

It has depth. It exists in space. It is not flat, neat, or perfectly linear. ABS takes something inherently dimensional and turns it into something far more rigid and simplified, then asks everyone to accept that reduction as objective truth. But what exactly is the basis for that confidence?

And here’s where the whole thing really falls apart for me. MLB’s own website admits the rulebook strike zone is three-dimensional, but the ABS strike zone is not. It is two-dimensional. The league also admits it tested a three-dimensional version, then moved away from it because breaking balls that nicked the edges of the zone were being picked up as strikes and that created inconsistency. But if a pitch nicks the edge of the actual strike zone, that is a strike. That is not a glitch. That is the rule. So instead of building a system that could judge pitches by the same rules human umpires are expected to follow, MLB created a different strike zone for the machine altogether. Which means the human umpire and ABS are not really even judging the same pitches.

How are we supposed to know, with complete certainty, that the ABS strike zone is perfectly calibrated? How are we supposed to know that the system’s depiction of the baseball in space is perfectly accurate? What is the acceptable margin of error for the machine? Half an inch? A quarter inch? Less? More? And who decided that whatever that margin is should suddenly override the trained judgment of the umpire standing right there on the field?

Because that is what this really comes down to. Baseball is being asked to replace visible human judgment with technological judgment that presents itself as unquestionable. But technological judgment is not the same thing as infallibility. It is still built by people, calibrated by people, maintained by people, and therefore still subject to limitation and error. The difference is that human error is honest. You can see it. You can argue with it. It is woven into the fabric of the game. Machine error, on the other hand, gets dressed up as certainty whether that certainty is deserved or not.

And the bigger issue is that this is not happening in a vacuum.

This is part of a broader pattern of Major League Baseball sanding down the rough edges of the sport in pursuit of neatness, pace, and artificial precision. The automatic runner at second base in extra innings is another perfect example.

A player can go 0-for-4 through nine innings and then start the tenth inning standing in scoring position without having earned his way there. Think about that for a second. In what version of baseball is that normal? Yes, games occasionally went long. Sometimes very long. And yes, that could be inconvenient. But that was part of the challenge. Part of the drama. Part of the endurance test. Part of the strategy. Part of the honesty of the sport. You had to actually win the game. The game was not supposed to start helping you do it because everybody got tired.

To alter the competitive structure of extra innings by placing an unearned runner on second base is not some harmless little tweak. It is an artificial intervention that changes the game itself.

And that is the larger concern here.

None of these things should be looked at in isolation. The problem is not just ABS. The problem is not just the automatic runner. The problem is the cumulative effect of all of it. Little by little, baseball is being flattened out. Cleaned up. Controlled. Sterilized. Made more convenient. Made more television-friendly. Made more algorithm-friendly. And in the process, it risks becoming less and less like the game so many of us loved to begin with.

Not everything that can be made more efficient should be made more efficient.

Not everything that can be technologized should be technologized.

And there is a world of difference between improving a sport and sterilizing it.

The ABS challenge system may seem modest compared to a fully automated strike zone, but in some ways that makes it even more dangerous. Balls and strikes are not some side issue. They are foundational to baseball’s rhythm, psychology, and texture. Once you start handing that foundation over to a machine, once the strike zone becomes whatever the technology says it is, you are not simply modernizing baseball. You are changing its nature.

Baseball has survived for generations because of its humanity, not in spite of it. Its beauty has always lived in the space between precision and imperfection, between structure and feel, between order and argument. Umpires are part of that. The grind of extra innings is part of that. The fact that baseball has never perfectly fit the modern appetite for speed, control, and constant intervention is part of that too.

Baseball’s future should not be secured by stripping away the very qualities that made generations of people love it in the first place. A game can be modernized right out of its soul. I would urge Major League Baseball to stop before that is exactly what happens here.

Respectfully,

JR Schumann 

Mt. Juliet, Tennessee