Neil Freiman

The ABS system, as it's called, has been tested in minor league games and throughout MLB spring training.

Fans love it, and players are cautiously optimistic it'll result in fairer play.

Under Commissioner Rob Manfred, the only thing constant about baseball is change.

In an attempt to balance the sport's hallowed traditions while still keeping up with the times, MLB has introduced a number of innovations in recent years to boost its popularity with modern fans, including a pitch clock to shorten marathon games.

All signs point to these acts of self-disruption being a huge success.

The game is more popular than it has been in decades, thanks to marketable superstars, a growing international audience, and tweaks like the pitch clock that have dramatically improved the product.

There's lots of optimism that this robot ump challenge system will only juice baseball's momentum.

It's going to impact strategy in a big way, and we don't know yet because the first game hasn't been played yet, but it'll be very interesting to watch who...

teams and managers let make challenges because, as I said, it can be the catcher, it can be the batter, or the pitcher.

Well, in spring training and last year, we have data on who's actually good at challenging calls.

Catchers were the best with a 56% overturn rate.

Batters came in second place with 50%.

And pitchers were in third place with 41%.

So maybe if I'm a manager, I'm saying I'm not letting a pitcher make this challenge because I didn't mention you only have two challenges over the course of the entire game.

If you get it right, you got to keep it, but you could lose them.

So you don't want necessarily a pitcher who's just pissed off making a challenge, tapping their head right away because then you end up losing the challenge.

Maybe the baseball umps are looking at what happened with tennis and have a little trepidation because, yes, there was an era in tennis where there was the challenge system.

But now they a lot of the majors have gotten rid of human refs completely.

And so there will be a question moving forward if this is successful about what the future of human umps will actually be.

But there's no question that all of the changes that Rob Manfred has made in baseball are paying dividends.