A fan watching the Arizona Diamondbacks watched a game end on a called strike three and did what any confused person does in 2025 — took it to Reddit. The post, which has since been removed by r/baseball moderators, asked a reasonable question: if Arizona still had a challenge left, why not use it on the final pitch of the game?
Here’s the thing. You can’t.
Major League Baseball’s replay review system, expanded in 2014 and tweaked several times since, covers a specific list of plays. According to MLB’s own glossary page on replay review, the reviewable calls include: potential home run calls, non-home run boundary calls, specified fair/foul ball calls, force and tag plays, catch plays in the outfield, specified baserunning calls, hit-by-pitch determinations, collisions at home plate, tag-ups, placement of runners, and interference on double plays.
Balls and strikes are nowhere on that list. A called strike three — even one that ends a game, even one that looks off the plate to everyone in the building — is a judgment call on the strike zone. It is not reviewable. Not in the regular season, not with a challenge remaining, not with the season on the line. The replay official sitting in the Replay Command Center in New York has no authority to overturn it because the rules simply don’t grant him that jurisdiction.
The confusion is understandable. The challenge system gives managers one challenge to start a game, and they retain it after every overturned call. A fan hearing that a team “still has a challenge” could reasonably assume that challenge covers anything disputed. It doesn’t. It covers the plays MLB decided to make reviewable, and the strike zone was deliberately excluded — the league has long treated balls and strikes as the umpire’s domain, a line it has refused to cross even as technology like ABS (Automated Ball-Strike system) gets tested in the minor leagues and spring training.
So when the Diamondbacks’ final batter walked back to the dugout on a called third strike and nobody in the Arizona dugout motioned toward an umpire, it wasn’t a managerial blunder. There was nothing to challenge. The replay system, for all its expansions over the last decade-plus, still has no mechanism for reviewing whether a pitch crossed the corner of the plate or missed it by a quarter inch.
The Reddit poster wrote, “Maybe I’m missing something, I’m no baseball expert.” They were missing exactly one thing: the rulebook. Balls and strikes stay with the man behind the plate. For now, anyway.
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