The Athletic’s Sam Blum has a notable detail about how MLB’s new Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System (ABS) will affect the viewing experience this season.
According to Blum, broadcast feeds showing the strike zone box will run on a roughly nine-second delay, MLB Gameday will operate on a five-second delay for pitch location data, and the low-latency feed inside ballparks won’t show the strike zone box or pitch location dots at all.
The practical result, per Blum’s reporting, is that fans watching at home, fans tracking Gameday, and fans sitting in the stadium will all be seeing something different, and none of it in real time. Fans at the park will actually have less visual information about pitch location than the person watching on their couch, nine seconds behind.
MLB Gameday is the league’s official live game-tracking tool on MLB.com and the MLB app that shows real-time pitch location, velocity, and type, along with a play-by-play feed, so it’s essentially a visual alternative to watching the actual broadcast.
Clearly, the league wants to eliminate any possibility that broadcast graphics could influence an ABS challenge before a player makes the call. Challenges must be initiated immediately — a pitcher, batter, or catcher taps their head right after the call — so the league is eliminating any chance that real-time data reaches the dugout.
As we covered a few days back — based on Jeff Agrest’s reporting in the Chicago Sun-Times — MLB had already announced that the filled-in circle distinguishing strikes from balls in the strike zone box would be removed this season, meaning all pitch dots will look the same regardless of the call. The strike zone box will only appear on in-stadium feeds inside the broadcast booth, stripped from jumbotrons and any monitors accessible to players or fans in the ballpark. Blum’s reporting adds specific delay figures that show how carefully MLB is managing the flow of information about ABS this season.
It’s a lot of infrastructure built around a fairly narrow concern — that someone in a dugout could watch a monitor and signal to a batter whether a pitch is worth challenging. But MLB is clearly not interested in finding out the hard way.
