{"id":237041,"date":"2026-04-29T10:31:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T14:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/29\/abs-technology-and-the-precarious-balance-between-human-and-machine\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T10:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T14:40:09","slug":"abs-technology-and-the-precarious-balance-between-human-and-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/29\/abs-technology-and-the-precarious-balance-between-human-and-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"ABS, Technology, and the Precarious Balance Between Human and Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/pitcherlist.com\/abs-technology-and-the-precarious-balance-between-human-and-machine\/\">ABS, Technology, and the Precarious Balance Between Human and Machine<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/pitcherlist.com\/abs-technology-and-the-precarious-balance-between-human-and-machine\/\">https:\/\/pitcherlist.com\/abs-technology-and-the-precarious-balance-between-human-and-machine\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-04-29 10:31:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"pitcherlist.com\">pitcherlist.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">In what is starting to feel like an annual event, headlines during the first week of the 2026 Major League Baseball season centered on the introduction of a new rule or innovation. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged the league to speed up the pace of play, leading to a permanent rule change <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2014 <\/span>namely, the use of ghost runners on second base in extra innings. The next two seasons saw a handful of minor tweaks, including the National League\u2019s long-awaited (and much-debated) adoption of the designated hitter in 2022, but a windfall came in 2023. MLB\u2019s newly formed Joint Competition Committee ushered in a number of core game-play rules, from a ban on the infield shift to the implementation of larger bases and a pitch clock. After additional refinements in 2024 and 2025, this current season has introduced a massive change: the application of the automated ball-strike (ABS) system to MLB game play.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">Experimentation with ABS began in 2019 at the lower levels of professional baseball. By 2023 the system had been implemented across Triple-A. There was, of course, debate about how it should be used, much of it centering on the history and nature of the strike zone. According to \u201cThe New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract\u201d (2001), the definition of the strike zone belonged to a flurry of rule changes in the 1880s. In the preceding years, hitters had been allowed to dictate the location of a pitch <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2014 <\/span>say, a high or a low ball. \u00a0Yet, in 1887, the strike zone was set basically from the shoulders to the knees. This iteration lasted until 1950, when the zone was shrunk from the armpits to the top of the knee. Additional changes would come in 1963, 1969, 1988, and 1996, ultimately settling on a zone from mid-torso to just below the kneecap. Of course, even as the strike zone crystallized, umpires didn\u2019t necessarily call balls and strikes in accordance with it. When pitch-by-pitch tracking began in 2008, it was revealed that the called&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/pitcherlist.com\/abs-technology-and-the-precarious-balance-between-human-and-machine\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ABS, Technology, and the Precarious Balance Between Human and Machine https:\/\/pitcherlist.com\/abs-technology-and-the-precarious-balance-between-human-and-machine\/ Publish Date: 2026-04-29 10:31:00&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":237042,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/pitcherlist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ABS-Tech-and-Balance-Use.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[62],"class_list":["post-237041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-innovation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237041"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237041"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":237043,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237041\/revisions\/237043"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}