WAYNE KNUCKLES: The Last Bad Call

Baseball didn't kill the umpire this spring.

It just put him on probation.

The 2026 season opened with something called the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System. Human umpires still call every pitch. But now each team gets two challenges a game. Don't like the call? Tap your helmet. A camera system called Hawk-Eye checks the math and the scoreboard tells 40,000 people whether the man behind the plate got it right.

Which is a polite way of calling him a liar in front of everybody.

There was a man named Red Brock who umpired softball in the league where I grew up. Big voice. No patience. When Red called you out, by George, you were out. Didn't matter what you saw.

Didn't matter what your daddy saw. Didn't matter if the pitch bounced twice before it crossed the plate. Red had spoken and the matter was closed.

We complained anyway.

That was the point.

I understand what baseball is trying to do here. They're not wrong that bad calls matter. They're not wrong that a blown strike three in the ninth inning can end a career or cost a pennant. Big league umpires get about 94 percent of pitches right, which sounds impressive until you're the guy who got squeezed on the other six percent.

But here's what's already happening.

Since the system kicked in, MLB's walk percentage has climbed to 9.9% — the highest rate since 1950. Umpires, apparently aware they're being graded in real time, have tightened up. Called fewer strikes. Given more benefit of the doubt. They've even got two-way microphones now so an ABS operator can tell them mid-game that they're calling strikes a little off the plate. 

So the human umpire is still there. He's just got somebody whispering in his ear.

Red Brock never had anybody whispering in his ear. Red Brock didn't need that. Red Brock was the final word, the last court of appeal, the sovereign authority of a chalk-lined patch of eastern Kentucky dirt, and he wore that responsibility like a man who'd earned it.

He was wrong sometimes. He knew it. He'd have walked into traffic before he said so. And after the game he'd be standing by the concession stand with a Coke, talking to the same people who'd spent three innings telling him he needed glasses.

Nobody stayed mad.

That's what I keep coming back to. The bad call was never just a bad call. It was an episode. A shared grievance. Something that made the game feel like it belonged to the people watching it, not just the people playing it. Billy Martin didn't kick dirt on a sensor. Earl Weaver didn't get nose-to-nose with a camera.

Those arguments were theater. Sacred, ridiculous, necessary theater.

One critic put it plainly: once you've decided the machine is the final authority on whether a call is right, you've quietly eliminated the case for having the human there at all.

That's not paranoia. That's a straight line.

The challenge system is the compromise. The middle ground. The thing they landed on because, when they tested the full robot system in the minors, fans and players still wanted a human element. Still wanted somebody standing back there making a call and living with it.

Good instinct.

Keep it.

Red would've hated the earpiece. But he'd have understood why it was there. He just wouldn't have needed it.

Neither did we.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly newspaper, The Pineville Sun.