Somewhere in the American League, a Chicago White Sox batter or pitcher looked at a called strike, didn’t like it, and fired off a challenge to the Automated Ball-Strike system. The system said no. Then somebody did it again — same at-bat, second hitter of the game. The system said no again.
Both challenges. Gone. Before the third batter dug in.
Under MLB’s 2026 ABS rules, each team starts a game with two challenges. Win one — meaning the call gets overturned — and you keep it. Lose one, and it’s spent. Burn both, and you’re sitting there the rest of the afternoon with no recourse when a 3-2 fastball six inches off the plate gets called strike three in the eighth with the bags full.
The White Sox know this territory better than anybody. Entering their May 9 game against Seattle, Chicago had won just 41% of their challenges as the fielding team — dead last in the majors, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. As the hitting team, they sat 17th, at 45%. Manager Will Venable had a chart taped to the helmet rack in the dugout, highlighting the best catcher-challenge zones, because if you’re going to throw challenges away, you might as well study where to throw them first.
“You’ve got to be mature about it, and you’ve got to think team-first,” shortstop Colson Montgomery told the Sun-Times, describing the discipline of not challenging on pure emotion.
The ABS system, rolled out league-wide this season, has handed players and managers a fresh layer of strategy to botch. Baseball Reference’s challenge data shows the overall overturn rate at 53.3% across MLB — meaning nearly half of all challenges fail. Catchers have been
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