How are the Detroit Tigers doing with ABS?

It’s 2026, which means baseball is partially governed by robots. More precisely, the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system is in place with the challenge system. Lots of ink, including our own, has been spilled on the new system; personally, I’m a fan of this intermediate step between letting CB Bucknor do whatever he wants and replacing umpires entirely.

ABS also adds a small layer of strategy on when to use a challenge or when to save it. Today, I want to see how well the Tigers are doing with their challenges. BaseballSavant helpfully keeps a leaderboard for each team’s challenge metrics.

I’ll be breaking those down here and examining where Detroit stands out, where they don’t, and why some of these metrics really don’t matter that much. These statistics are all based upon a league-wide “expected” challenge formula developed by Tom Tango. You can read more about it here , but put simply, by evaluating the distance from the edge of the plate, how much is left of the game, and how many challenges a team has remaining, Tango developed a method to determine how likely any pitch is to be challenged.

This results in “net overturns more than expected” for four basic scenarios: the offense and defense when Detroit is batting, and the offense and defense when Detroit is pitching. Offensive Challenges Offensively speaking, the two categories of note are “net overturns more than expected for” and “net overturns more than expected against”. “For” is the category for when a Tiger batter initiates the challenge, while “against” means the opposing team’s pitcher or catcher initiated.