2026 SABR Analytics: Watch highlights from MLB Statcast Updates: Baseball Savant and ABS
At the SABR Analytics Conference on Saturday, February 28, 2026, in Phoenix, Arizona, a team from MLB Statcast provided an update on system features related to Baseball Savant and automatic balls-and-strikes (ABS).
Panelists included: David Adler, Graham Goldbeck, and Do-Hyoung Park from Major League Baseball.
- Watch: Click here to watch a video replay of MLB Statcast Updates: Baseball Savant and ABS (YouTube)
Here are some highlights from the panel:
On the effect of timing batters’ swings
- Adler: “Looking at the leaders when this comes out, it should match your sense of how hitters swing at the ball or what types of swings pitchers are inducing with their different pitch types.
On “Miss Distance” leaderboards at Baseball Savant
- Adler: “You’ll be able to filter these a lot of different ways. There’s the typical style of the Baseball Savant leaderboards, by count, by pitch type, by the zone where the pitch is. You might want to look at high pitches versus low pitches differently. So we’ll have all of that available on leaderboards when they come out.”
On ABS challenge success rates by hitters and fielders
- Park: “There’s a little bit more of a stabilized seven-day ruling overturn and challenge rate that we present, just to see if there are any meaningful trends that you can see. The only full-season data we have available for this right now is 2025 Triple-A regular season. So we’re also interested to see, as we go on, is the (challenge) skill going to get better? Are overturn rates going to increase? Are challenge rates going to move meaningfully as we go through the season? This is going to be where we’re able to see those trends.”
On changes to the strike zone because of the ABS system
- Park: “The strike zone is definitionally changing. We took a lot of care to make sure that whatever strike zones you see regarding ABS site-wide are now going to be ball/strike accurate. A ball is a ball. A strike is a strike.”
On strikeout vs. walk rates
- Goldbeck: “You can see the strikeout rate has actually been growing for a while. I know analytics gets a bad rep for driving this number a lot higher in recent years, but there’s a jump here in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s been a plateau lately, and we’re hoping it stays that way. We also see the walk rate is fairly consistent throughout this whole period, and that’s kind of one of the things we’re banking on with this system. The zone is smaller, so in theory, if pitchers threw exactly the same as they have historically, there might be more challenges and more walks. But we think ultimately the pitchers are in control of the ball, and they have some upper limit of how many walks they want to allow. So we think they’ll probably change their behavior slightly, and we don’t expect these numbers to change drastically with the challenge system.”
On umpire behavior following a check-swing challenge
- Goldbeck: “As soon as we started instituting this 45-degree angle, before that, they would call it at about 15-18 degrees. That was kind of the “break-even point,” where half the time it would be called a strike, half the time it wouldn’t be called a strike. After we implemented ABS, it very quickly jumped to 40 degrees. So we do think this is something that can be taught and changes here. Again, this is early testing, but we’re very encouraged and will probably continue to look at this in the future.”
Transcription assistance from Dazhane Moseley.
For more coverage of the 2026 SABR Analytics Conference, visit SABR.org/analytics.
Originally published: May 1, 2026. Last Updated: March 4, 2026.