There was a demonstration given to media Tuesday afternoon.
PHOENIX, Arizona — In addition to Commissioner Rob Manfred’s news conference Tuesday, MLB also spent part of the afternoon demonstrating how the ABS ball-and-strike challenge system test will be done during Spring Training this year.
Morgan Sword, who is MLB’s Executive VP of Baseball Operations, made a 13-minute presentation with visuals and video that describe how and where the tests will be made.
Rather than walk you through everything Sword described in his presentation, I’m going to let you watch the entire thing yourself [VIDEO].
It’s kind of too bad that this testing won’t go on for Cubs home games during Spring Training, but MLB chose the five Arizona spring parks that host two teams (Salt River Fields, Peoria Stadium, Surprise Stadium, Camelback Ranch and Goodyear Ballpark) for the tests, so that as many home teams as possible could be involved. Cubs away games at those parks, including Thursday’s spring opener vs. the Dodgers at Camelback Ranch, will be included. One thing Sword did say is that while during regular-season games, these sorts of challenges (two per game) would likely be held back for critical situations in the late innings and late in counts, in this test players are going to be encouraged to ask for more challenges, so the league can get more data for analysis.
Based on what I heard in this presentation, there’s no guarantee that this system will be in MLB in 2026, though I hope the league will have enough data to do that. It will be used in all Triple-A games this year, but not at the lower levels, since the system they need to make this work requires technology that it might be difficult to install at those ballparks.
Another brief presentation, running a bit less than four minutes, was made regarding two minor rule tweaks that will be instituted this year. Based on what I saw, you likely won’t see these much, if at all, but the league felt it was necessary to make these minor changes.
Again, instead of describing them, I’ll just let you watch the presentation [VIDEO].