One of the most fascinating elements of the 2026 MLB season, at least for most of us, has been the introduction of the ABS challenge system for balls and strikes.
I, personally, have spent over a decade campaigning for more technology in the strike zone. And while it has been incredible and amazing to see it finally arrive, it has also brought with it a myriad of new concepts to get familiar with. A lot of it can feel confusing at first. Luckily, we’ve got resources!
There’s few things baseball nerds love more than a good stat and for my money you won’t find a better collection of data to help you navigate this new landscape than you will at TapToChallenge.com. You can get all the info on which players, teams, and umpires are making the most of this system. Importantly, we get to see missed calls that don’t get challenged, a stat called “missed opportunities” which is key to understanding where value is being gained and lost.
Given that there are so many moving pieces and this is all so new, I figured it would be best to reach out to the proprietor of TapToChallenge and ask a few questions. Here is what he had to say: (Please note that these questions were asked more than a month ago so some of the details may have shifted but the overall points remain the same.)
DC: What can you tell me about yourself?
Nate: My name is Nate, and I’m really just another guy that finds beauty in the side of baseball that gets played on paper. My dad was a big Red Sox fan, so while I grew up in the Tampa area and spent a lot of time at the Trop, I’ve kept up with and pulled for Boston my entire life. I lived in the Boston area for about a decade after graduating college and currently reside in Austin, Texas.
DC: What prompted you to begin TapToChallenge.com?
Nate: A few years back I deconstructed wRC+ and gained a better understanding of how game states and individual events in baseball are evaluated in the ways that Savant, Baseball Reference, and Fangraphs have popularized. To be specific, one of the core inputs in wRC+ is Run Expectancy. Once you know how that works you can make a very solid calculation of what it means (in runs) to a team to go from, for example, a 1-1 count to a 1-2 count.
I was talking with my brothers at Thanksgiving last year and we found that there wasn’t anything readily available to look at the 2025 Spring Training ABS results. I pretty much immediately understood how impactful these overturned calls were and figured this would be a fun way to build something people would enjoy digging through.
DC: What were/are some of the most interesting challenges in putting the site together?
Nate: I’d say the trickiest challenge is the one that I’ve had multiple people ask how to derive from MLB’s API. If an ABS challenge happens mid plate appearance it’s stored in one field, but if it results in the finality of the PA it’s stored in another. The documentation is also not doing anyone any favors. When I initially put the database together that one took me a bit to realize.
DC: The site looks clean! How did the look of it come together?
Nate: The best looking parts of the site are the places where I’m able to drop art from @kylie.the.kid showing Shohei Ohtani, Cal Raleigh, and Garrett Crochet tapping their heads. Kylie also created the logo for the site which I’ve used as a guide for the color palette throughout the rest of it. Functionally I take inspiration from the baseball related sites I mentioned earlier, some old video game stat databases, and dashboards I’ve come across in my professional life.
DC: Your glossary does an excellent job of explaining each stat. (I’ll include text from the glossary here for RE and WPA) how do you use particularly RE and WPA toward determining who YOU think is getting the most out of the challenge system?
Nate: I think if you only hone in on RE and WPA in evaluating ABS you’ll miss out on the full picture of what’s really going on. These stats are great because they show the impact in a way everyone can understand, but they rely on the high value situations being available in the first place. Take a look at Edgar Quero on the White Sox.
At the time of me writing this, he’s the only player by taptochallenge.com definition to have eclipsed 7 net runs gained while no one else has 6 — but his success in run generation is entirely due to circumstance. His challenge on 4/16 against the Rays that flipped a bases loaded walk into an inning ending strikeout is tied for the lead as far as individual challenge run gains go (it was worth over 1.7 runs) and he has 2 other successful challenges in the top 40. In order to win these challenges he had to be presented with a bad call in a high value spot in the first place, which is something not many players are going to see very often.
I wrote about this topic extensively in my April blog post where I introduced the concept of Challenge Decision Quality (CDQ). Instead of looking at Edgar Quero’s run generation, we should be looking at every pitch that he has the option to challenge and make a full evaluation of his decisions including the context of where the pitch was.
Decisions Decisions
Deciding not to challenge a ball that was spiked in the dirt a foot from home plate is an easy decision. Deciding to not tap your head when a pitch misses the edge by half an inch is much harder. When we look at Quero’s decisions in this framework, we see this: he’s had 1154 called balls caught so far this season and 64 of them were truly strikes. He’s correctly challenged 24 of them, left 40 missed opportunities on the table, and has additionally wrongly challenged another 27 that were truly balls. At varying degrees of difficulty per pitch, I calculate his Catcher CDQ at -8.17 — worst in the league by a very, very wide margin.
DC: Can you explain, in as simple terms as possible (lol I know) the value of a WON challenge vs. the value of a LOST challenge and why they aren’t just the exact same in reverse?
Each team gets two ABS challenges a game and only loses them when they incorrectly challenge a pitch. If you lose a challenge on the first pitch of a game like Zach Neto and Gabriel Moreno have done, your team now has to go through the next couple hundred pitches with only one remaining challenge. If you lose a challenge on the last pitch of the game that otherwise results in a strikeout and puts another tally in the L column you aren’t risking anything at all – even if you lose, there aren’t any pitches left to challenge. The calculations on my site are adjusting for this, so if you go look at some very late game challenges you’ll see the value of a lost challenge approaches 0.
DC: Do you see anything in the stats that suggest possible trends/changes in the future? For example, the whole system being new, I might expect players to start challenging more as they get more comfortable with it. The success rate for players has seemed to plateau around 54 percent. Do you think that remains steady?
For a few weeks early in the season we saw way more challenges being made in situations that players should just be shaking off. The leaguewide breakeven challenge rate was 19%, simply meaning that players needed to be correct 19% of the time to make their challenges ‘worth it’ in terms of run value generated. That number has been steadily dropping and as of yesterday had a 7 day rolling average under 17% for the first time. In other words, across the whole league, players are taking challenges that have higher value when won and lower cost when lost than they did through mid April. I’d expect to see that number never make it up to the high 19%s again.
One thing I’m interested in seeing is how teams approach ABS in playoff games. The Red Sox played a game on March 28th against the Reds that got a lot of attention after burning both of their challenges by the 3rd inning allowing CB Bucknor to miss 11 calls against them. Those calls were worth 1.8 runs in a game that the Reds won by 1. At the moment, 38.3% of challenges are used in innings 7+. I wouldn’t be surprised if playoff teams try to align a little more with the Orioles strategy where over 54% of challenges are used in innings 7+ while still generating competitive run and win value (12th and 8th in the league respectively).
DC: Have these numbers or you identified a TYPE of player that is getting the most value out of ABS? It’s still early I know but pitchers obviously challenge way less often. Are catchers getting more calls for soft-tossing control guys vs. velocity guys? Is there an area of the zone (top?) that is specifically affected, maybe giving certain pitchers an advantage?
The variable that matters most in this game of inches is batter height, so here’s what I’ll be looking at as the year progresses and more data comes in: a 6’6” batter has a strike zone that starts 1.755 feet from the ground and goes until it reaches a height of 3.478 feet.
A 5’10” batter has one that starts 1.575 feet from the ground and goes up to 3.121 feet. Batters will be making their own personal adjustments as the season goes on, but catchers are the ones to really evaluate closely. In the example I just gave, that’s a difference of 2.16 inches on the bottom part of the plate and 4.28 inches on the top. Catchers that can visually map the strikezone to the differences in height are going to see success.
Inside a new resource for tracking MLB ABS challenge system stats Mile High Sports.
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