What Sorcery Is This?

I just saw the check-swing challenge in action. Life will never be the same

Thanks for reading The Dope. Your support drives the train.

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I was in Las Vegas for the usual reasons, minor league baseball, when the magic happened. A batter tried to check his swing on a tempting pitch. The first-base umpire rang him up — “Yes, he did.” It’s a check-swing strike.

But wait! This is Triple-A! In Triple-A, anything can happen! You can even appeal a checked swing.

This is a gift that has not been offered to those in Major League Baseball — yet another way in which the minor leagues are clearly superior. The technology does in fact exist to override decades of first-base umps just sort of blithely guessing whether or not a player went a little too far with his half swing on a pitch that initially looked like it might be a strike, but which eventually was clearly headed for ball territory.

It exists on the same software platform (Hawk-Eye) that MLB already uses to facilitate and determine challenges on balls and strikes. Yet Rob Manfred and the boys aren’t yet persuaded that, despite already leasing this software, they should offer a check-swing challenge in the big leagues.

I got to see it in Vegas.

In short: It’s sorcery.

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What a ghostly apparition this thing is. The check-swing challenge replay, thrown up there on the big outfield scoreboard for everyone to watch (just like the ABS challenge), removes all the players from the scene. It then re-creates the batter’s swing path without any other video game character being involved — just a bat free-floating in the disembodied algorithmic soup of a suddenly darkened Hawk-Eye miniverse.

Like this (it’s from a previous trial period in the Arizona Fall League):

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Using Hawk-Eye to provide the particulars, a swing is declared when the maximum angle between the bat head and the bat handle is greater than 45 degrees — what we used to call “breaking the plane.” This is something that no umpire at any time in baseball history has been able to repetitively, reliably determine using his human eye from 90 feet away. It’s asking way too much of a mortal being.

In this case: Swing confirmed. Nice try on the challenge, batter. You’re still out.

The cool thing is, this challenge simply becomes part of the overall ABS process. You still only receive two challenges per game as a team. You can use them to protest ball or strike calls; you can use them to try to wiggle out of a checked swing — or, if you’re the pitcher or catcher on the opposing team, to claim that the batter did swing even though the umpire says he didn’t go. But either way, when you’ve blown two challenges, you’re done for the night. If you’re right, you get to keep going.

This trial is being carried out in two leagues, the Class-A Florida State League and the Pacific Coast League, in which reside the Las Vegas Aviators, the Triple-A affiliate of the Athletics. The challenge just came on line in the PCL at the start of May.

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I’ll say this: Neither team in Vegas last week seemed quite sure what to do with it. Players on both sides are completely comfortable challenging balls and strikes, which they’ve been doing in the minors for years now, but the whole check-swing thing appeared to throw them. There was one challenge across six games despite numerous check-swing calls by the umps.

That number will rise, just as ABS totals began to rise as the technology became more familiar to the players. Eventually, you’ll see this in Major League Baseball, because as far as I can tell there aren’t really any kinks to work out — it is strictly a matter of gaining acceptance.

If you’ve seen your share of awful check-swing calls by the big boys, I have no doubt that you’re already on board:

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(Caution: Continuous-loop video above does sprinkle salt on the still-fresh wound of selected San Francisco Giants fans.)

P.S. I won enough at blackjack to pay for part of one nice meal.