I had it in my mind to write this article a day or so ago after hearing the rankings of MLB teams on successful ABS challenges.

So you’ll forgive me for writing it the day after the Cubs failed on two of three challenges in their loss to the Padres, including one by Matthew Boyd in the first inning, that he later said he shouldn’t have made.

Yeah, that’s a bad one. Not only because it was pretty clearly a ball, but that’s only the fourth pitch of the game! Perhaps a bit rattled, Boyd wound up walking Ramon Laureano, helping trigger a three-run Padres inning.

But in general, the Cubs have done well in ABS challenges. A new site called Tap to Challenge has taken data that’s been made available by Baseball Savant and sliced and diced it in a number of ways.

This chart shows the Cubs as the sixth-best team overall in challenges at a 60.3 percent success rate (through Monday’s games), just behind the Tigers at 60.4 percent and Mariners at 60.6 percent. The Royals top the leaderboard at 62.3 percent.

Breaking this down further, Cubs batters rank 17th at 46.2 percent (the D-backs lead at 52.6 percent) and Cubs catchers rank second with a 73.3 percent success rate (the Tigers lead at 85 percent).

Just 41 challenges have been made by pitchers, with 17 being successful (41.4 percent). Boyd’s challenge was the second made by a Cubs pitcher so far this year. The other, which was successful, was by Edward Cabrera on April 11 against the Pirates [VIDEO].

The most challenges by a team’s pitchers is five, by the Yankees. Yankees pitchers have been correct three times. Eight teams (Twins, Royals, Padres, Reds, Blue Jays, Rays, Diamondbacks and Brewers) have not had any challenges by pitchers, and in general, teams are telling pitchers not to challenge. The 41 pitcher challenges are just 2.3 percent of the total of 1,767 challenges made in total by all players.

There’s been some discussion here about whether MLB should eventually go to a full ABS system. Personally, I like the challenge system. It creates some strategy — obviously, losing a challenge in the first inning and both challenges by the third hurt the Cubs Monday night. It gets fans involved, you’ve certainly heard the cheering by home fans when their player is correct.

Last week at The Athletic, Jayson Stark wrote an article that detailed more of the things I’ve mentioned here, headlined “When will MLB go ‘full ABS,’ let robot umps take over? Maybe never.” I know that’s going to make some of you unhappy, but here’s some of the reasoning:

Do we really want ABS to tell us whether 700,000 pitches a year are balls and strikes? That’s a momentous question because it would be such a momentous change.

“You should only make changes if it makes the game better,” former Cubs/Red Sox/MLB rules visionary Theo Epstein said, as far back as 2023, in an appearance on the Starkville podcast with me and my co-host, Doug Glanville. “You have to figure out exactly what you’re solving for. With ABS, you don’t want to force a solution without a problem.”

Theo is correct, in my view. What if MLB went to a system like this, with umpires no longer used to calling balls and strikes, and the technology went down? Then you’re asking for trouble, in asking people who wouldn’t be doing this important thing to suddenly have to do it accurately.

The article says that for a time in 2023 and 2024, they experimented with full ABS in Triple-A, then surveyed players and fans on the system. The results might surprise you:

Check out the results from this survey, conducted in August 2024. Players and coaches were asked: Which ABS format do you prefer? You might want to look away because “full ABS” is about to take a hellacious drubbing.

Challenge system — 54 percentFull ABS — 8 percentHuman umps — 38 percent

Eight percent? They were being offered a chance to get every call right, and not even one in 10 wanted that? I think they were trying to tell us something.

Fans in Triple A weren’t quite that vociferous. But it was still more than a 2-to-1 runaway win for the challenge system over full ABS.

Challenge system — 47 percentFull ABS — 23 percentHuman umps 30 percent

Personally, I think that as the challenge system in MLB gets better because players get better at it, the percentage answering “human umps” in a survey like that would get smaller. And don’t take it only from me, take it from a former player who’s now a Triple-A manager: