Mets who will benefit most from the new ABS challenge system

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — About halfway through spring training, the Mets had appealed to their robot overlords 17 times going into Thursday’s 7-4 loss to the Nationals.

It wasn’t exactly the plan all along. As Major League Baseball gets set to implement the automatic ball-strike challenge system this season, manager Carlos Mendoza had said the goal was to “be aggressive . . . ”

“Challenge as much as possible,” he said on Feb. 19, two days before games began. “We want to see who’s good and who’s not before we start putting guidelines and come up with a game plan.”

But intention and reality are two different things, and though it’s still early and the sample size is small, some trends are emerging.

A look into this year’s data, last year’s data and examples from Triple-A, which had a full season using ABS last year, paints a clearer picture of how ABS could affect this coming season and which players stand to benefit (and which may suffer).

For one thing, plenty of teams are being conservative, even when the games don’t count. Though they’d done it only 17 times, the Mets aren’t exactly bottom of the barrel when it comes to challenges — between batters and fielders, they’ve challenged 3.3% of challengeable events, which is close to league average (the only fielders allowed to challenge are pitchers and catchers). That’s in line with what happened in Triple-A last year, where the range of batter challenges was between 3.2 and 6.9% and fielder challenges ranged from 1.5% to 2.9%. In Triple-A last year and this year’s spring training, about 50% of challenges were successful.

The Mets are not yet exactly thriving under the system, though: According to Baseball Savant’s spring training ABS data, their -4.2 overturns versus expected overturns are the ninth worst in baseball. Their batters are better than average but their pitchers and catchers are among the worst.

There’s good reason for that: “I threw one [where] I thought I threw it right down the middle because our catcher caught it so well. It ended up being like three balls down,” Nolan McLean said last week.

That alone tells us that framing — a catcher’s ability to “steal” a strike — is still going to be part of the game, if not to the same extent. Unless successful, teams have only two challenges per nine-inning game, and a catcher’s ability to fool the batter and the umpire will have its place — particularly if teams remain cautious about when to deploy a challenge.

Another observation: There are players on this roster who can really benefit and some who might need to make some adjustments.

Here are a few players to keep an eye on during the season:

Juan Soto

No shock there. The human strike zone challenged four times in spring training last year and won all four. He hasn’t done it yet this year — and currently is playing with the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic — but it’s not a weapon to be discounted.

Before games began, Soto’s well-honed eye was on full display during live batting practice.

“Never say never,” Soto said when asked if he anticipates challenging a lot. “But that’s not my focus this year. This year my focus is my swings and how I can do damage out there.”

One thing to note, though: Soto had more calls in his favor last year than against. Only 2% of the pitches he saw were balls that were erroneously called strikes, compared to 2.8% being strikes erroneously called balls.

Clay Holmes

The movement on Holmes’ pitches makes him hard to track, and that was the case with umpires, too. Of the 2,766 pitches he threw last season, 2.3% were called balls despite being strikes — among the highest such percentages in baseball for pitchers with similar workloads.

Sean Manaea

This one is a little trickier because of the small sample size, but Manaea’s rough season last year wasn’t helped by the umpires, who erroneously called 3% of his pitches balls although they were in the zone. It’s hard to tell how much of this points to a larger trend because the big lefty’s arm slot changed so dramatically midway through 2024. In fact, the Mets believed he actually dropped it too much last year. Mendoza said Manaea’s mechanics are back to where they should be, but if the lower arm slot really is making an impact, ABS could steal him back some strikes.

Freddy Peralta

Peralta is deceptive — to umpires, too. His bread-and-butter fastball has the appearance of rising, and he mixes in his secondary pitches at will, often adapting his game plan to what he sees from the batter in real time. Altogether, he gets far more favorable calls than most. Of the 3,087 pitches he threw, 32 were in the strike zone but were called balls; compare that to the 63 pitches that were called strikes despite being balls.

Notes & quotes: McLean felt no recurrence of his vertigo-like symptoms after pitching in a simulated game Wednesday and intends to join Team USA in the World Baseball Classic on Friday in Houston . . . Manaea and Kodai Senga will get their first starts of spring training, with Manaea going Friday against the Marlins and Senga facing the Cardinals, both in Jupiter . . . Brett Baty played his first spring training game in rightfield and Jorge Polanco played first base for the first time in real-game action. Both were errorless in limited attempts. Baty also hit an opposite-field homer.