The New Strike Zone

The start of October brings two of my favorite things: sweater weather and playoff baseball (Go Sox!) The beginning of the 2026 season brought us exciting new technology: the Automatic Ball-Strike system. ABS allows batters, pitchers, and catchers the opportunity to challenge the called strike or ball. Each team is allowed two missed challenges for the game (a correct challenge will not exhaust a usable challenge). I was initially skeptical of the implementation, but ABS has led to many exciting moments! Watching a pitch challenged in real time, and hearing the crowd noise is surprisingly electric.

Since 2020, the MLB has implemented a series of hawk-eye cameras focused on movement of the baseball, players, umpires, and even coaches to track statistics (a.k.a. Statcast). There is a series of 12 cameras, seven of which focus on the players and five of which capture the baseball’s movement at a whopping 300 frames-per-second! The high speed of the camera not only allows the camera to track the ball within one-sixth of an inch but also tracks the spin and rise/drop of the baseball.

MLB.com has a cool interactive guide with visual examples if my explanation wasn’t enough for you. Baseball Savant has a ton of statistics generated by ABS if you want to see all the hard data.

Now, GO SOX!