ABS is coming to college baseball. What does South Carolina think about it?

As the changes continue to come, the line between college and professional baseball only keeps getting blurrier. The latest example came Monday, when the NCAA Baseball Rules Committee approved the SEC’s request to use a challenge system for balls and strikes at the SEC Tournament later this month.

The Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System was officially implemented in Major League Baseball this season, though it had already undergone several years of testing in the lower levels of professional baseball dating back to 2019. Now, college baseball will get to try it out for the first time as well.

ABS will be used for each game at this year’s conference tournament, which will be played May 19-24 in Hoover, Ala. As a member of the SEC, South Carolina will be one of the first teams to utilize the system.

“It’s certainly going to be different just being able to challenge ball and strike calls,” interim head coach Monte Lee said on Thursday. “Look, I don’t want to be critical of something that I don’t quite understand. It’s one of my favorite quotes, ‘Don’t be critical of things you don’t understand.’ So I don’t understand how it’s going to change the game quite yet. So I want to see it play out.”

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Teams will get to challenge an umpire’s ball or strike call through the automated system, which tracks the exact location of each pitch. Each team will begin a game with three challenges and will keep a challenge if it is successful. If the original call is upheld, then that challenge will be lost.

In extra innings, both teams will receive one additional challenge per inning. That challenge can be retained within the inning if successful but will not carry over to the next inning.

Any challenge must be initiated immediately after the pitch by a player tapping the top of the cap or helmet. After the umpire signals that a challenge has been called for, an animated pitch result graphic will be displayed on the stadium videoboard and on the television broadcast, showing the location of the pitch, whether the call was confirmed or overturned, and the updated ball-strike count.  

“It’s definitely a different aspect of the game,” Jake Randolph said. “The game’s evolving at a fast rate. But it’s cool. I mean, both sides get a say in what happens in the game. So I think that’s a cool part of it.”

Hoover Metropolitan Stadium will be equipped with cameras that will track the movement of each pitch. This is how the automated system can place the location of the ball within the strike zone.

Each hitter’s strike zone will also be unique. Measurements for every player will be collected before each team’s first game of the tournament, allowing the system to establish an individualized strike zone based on that player’s height.

“My biggest concern is that the strike zones are tighter than ever, and because, again, umpires are being held accountable because of TrackMan data, which makes it tough on them, right?” Lee said. “So the strike zone is tighter than ever. Does this make the strike zone even tighter? That’s just my concern, but we’ll see.”

Lee, who said he would’ve loved to have something like this during his playing days at Charleston in the late 1990s, plans to speak with people in professional baseball who have experience using the system to get a better understanding of how it works.

As for how he and South Carolina plan to prepare for ABS ahead of the tournament, Lee said there really aren’t any plans to do so — at least not yet. The Gamecocks still have seven games remaining in the regular season, and their focus will remain there for the time being until they get to Hoover.

“We’ll get there whenever we get there,” Lee said. “… I don’t know exactly when the right time is to address it, but I don’t anticipate addressing it. I mean, I’m certainly not going to address it this weekend. We may talk about it before we go to Vanderbilt. But again, I don’t want the focus to be on something that we’re not going to be able to use, I guess, until we get to the conference tournament.

“I’ll be in uncharted water because I haven’t had to do something along those lines before. So I’ll have to figure out the right time to do that.”

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