Tag Archives: Chicago Cubs

Two Bs and a Tuck

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Alex Bregman

“There’s an excitement in the air about Cubs baseball,” said their new $175 million third baseman Alex Bregman after signing with the team last week.

What a week, right? Just like that, three of the more luminous members of this winter’s free agency class found new homes for varying dollars.

The usual suspects scream blue murder. A few unusual suspects pick up Dodger manager Dave Roberts’s expressed equal adoration for a salary cap and a salary floor. So, who’s coming out how, where, and why? Let’s look with sober eyes.

Da Bear Market Dept.—Think about it: On the same evening the NFL’s Chicago Bears shoved the Green Bay Packers to one side and out of the race for the Super Bowl, in Soldier Field, the Cubs made erstwhile Astro/Red Sox third baseman Alex Bregman a rather wealthy man.

With the Red Sox thought to be pushing a bit extra to bring Bregman back, the Cubs pushed enough to land Bregman on a five-year, $175 million that includes a mutually agreed-upon $70 million worth of deferred money.

You think Bregman’s new teammates weren’t enthused about the deal and their new mate? “I texted him when the news broke: ‘Dude, let’s freaking go’,” said pitcher Jameson Taillon, an Arizona neighbour of Bregman’s according to The Athletic. “He FaceTimed me. He was like, ‘Hey, we’re just finishing up dinner. Can I come over?’”

He wasn’t alone, wrote the journal’s Patrick Mooney: “Pete Crow-Armstrong, the All-Star center fielder, was in attendance at Soldier Field when he found out that Bregman would be a new teammate. Immediately after seeing the reports, Gold Glove shortstop Dansby Swanson called Bregman from a friend’s wedding.”

The Cubs made a run for the postseason last year. After a few years behaving like the big city kid who seemed to be seduced by the outskirts of Four Corners, Nowhere in Particular, they started behaving like the bigger market team they’re supposed to be once the postseason run ended.

“There’s an excitement in the air about Cubs baseball,” said Bregman while he made a bit of a whirl-around Chicago tour last week. “I can’t wait to get after it.” Pause. “After it” means “pennant race” and “World Series trip” for a man who now picked uniform number 3 to indicate he’d like a third World Series ring as well as stability for his family.

He’s known as a student of the game, a disciplined hitter, a sharp-fielding third baseman, and a clubhouse godsend. All Bregman has to do is live up to all that as best a 31-year-old with more than a few miles on him can, as he did when his body allowed in Boston last year. Da Cubs will make sure his appreciation is far, wide, and deep.

Tucker, the Man and His Team Dept.—Meanwhile, an erstwhile Cub lit the fuse on fresh screaming over the big, bad, behemoth Dodgers and their big, bad, behemoth platinum vault. The erstwhile Cub is Kyle Tucker, considered the number one free agent in the winter class by those who thought Bregman was the class’s second banana.

Tucker signed up for four years, $240 million, and opt-outs after years two and three. The deal also includes $30 million in deferred dollars. If Tucker helps the Dodgers to a third straight World Series title, Dodger City will consider it all very wisely spent. If he doesn’t or can’t, well . . .

That screaming won’t be limited to denunciations of the Dodgers as the new Evil Empire. It’ll include audible-in-the-Klingon-Empire demands for explanations as to why a no-doubt talent but with 27.3 wins above replacement-level in eight season is pulling down $17 million a year more than Aaron Judge, Yankee bombardier first class, who earned about 3.0 more WAR just over three of the past four years.

The Dodgers are betting on Tucker’s future coming somewhere near Judge’s present, of course. Aside from the dollars, the Dodgers could offer something far deeper to the low-keyed Tucker. He can do Tucker things without the floodlights baking him too heavily compared to the rest of the Dodgers’ star power.

He might have been the star of this free agency market, when Bregman and Bo Bichette weren’t, but that’s about as far as Tucker seems to care to go when it comes to attracting attention with anything beyond his still-growing bat and his virtuosity playing right field.

What’s Bo Know Dept.—Bo Bichette is a Met. Roll the rhyme around awhile, Metsropolitan New York. Savour the possibilities to come with a healthy Bichette helping the Mets ride all the way to a postseason. (Remember: He came off the injured list to be one of the shining time Blue Jays in last year’s World Series.)

Now, be afraid. Be very afraid. Because the Mets plan for their new $126 million infield toy is to move him from his normal shortstop to third base. Every Met fan since the day they were born will warn you. The Mets don’t have a sterling history of third base conversions. (Mets legend David Wright was born to the position, you may remember.)

Ask what happened when they traded a talented but still-erratic arm named Nolan Ryan to the Angels for a veteran elite shortstop named Jim Fregosi . . . and decided to turn that veteran elite shortstop into a third baseman. Case closed.

Bichette can hit. The only population that doesn’t know that might be a colony of Arctic walruses. But with the glove? He’s 36 defensive zone runs below his league average as a shortstop, and his range factors per game are below the average, too. He played a little second base in the minors but not a lick of third base in the Show.

The Mets turned toward Bichette more seriously (they’d been talking previously) when Tucker went California bound the night before. The Phillies saw the Mets embrace Bichette and elected to reunite with veteran catcher J.T. Realmuto after all.

Now all the Mets have to do is get a read on whether Bichette will be the second coming of poor Jim Fregosi or the first coming of Bo Bichette, third base maven. Not to mention whether Brett Baty, the incumbent third base Met, will have a reasonable future moving to the corner outfield, as some reports speculate.

Well, the Mets have been many things over the decades. Boring has rarely been one of them.

Manfred’s just thinking aloud. Isn’t he?

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Rob Manfred

Manfred insists he’s done when his contract is. What manner of mischief might he wreak before then?

This is commissioner Rob Manfred’s story and he’s sticking to it. For now. Ask him whether he’s going to want to rethink his previously-enunciated intent to retire when his current contract expires in three years, and he digs in like a batter who knows he’s facing not Bob Gibson but Bobo Garglebargle.

“I’m done at the end of this contract. I’ve told [the owners] that, and I’m gonna stick to it,” Manfred insisted in a WFAN radio interview last week. “I’ll be 70. It is enough . . . You have a certain period of time when you have things that you want to accomplish, you take your best shot, you try to get as much done as possible. And then it’s sort of time for the next guy with his set of things. And I think that’s healthy and good for this.”

So far, so good. So, what does the most inveterate tinkerer who ever held the commissioner’s office want to get done before he moseys off into the sunset?

Without saying he’s committed to it—yet—Manfred mentioned discussions about inflicting a split season and in-season tournaments upon major league baseball. “We do understand that 162 (games) is a long pull,” he said. “I think the difficulty to accomplish those sort of in-season events, you almost inevitably start talking about fewer regular-season games.”

But not fewer postseason rounds and games, of course. Manfred isn’t that sensible. “It is a much more complicated thing in our sport than it is in other sports,” he continued. “Because of all of our season-long records, you’re playing around with something that people care a lot about.”

You’re playing around with a lot more than that, Commissioner Pepperwinkle.

Wait until it gets to the part where he speaks of bringing MLB to 32 teams. And, realigning baseball into eight divisions of four teams each. Presuming it’s going to be one new team in each league, would it do to suggest something a lot more sensible?

You guessed it. I’m going there again. Instead of eight divisions of four teams each, how about four divisions of eight teams each? How about two such divisions in each league? If you wish, you can keep them named the National League East and West, and the American League East and West. Goodbye three-division lunacy and wild-card whackadoodling.

Think of the benefits that would come forth. I’ve made the argument before, but it’s worth making it yet again. Four divisions, eight teams each, and you don’t get to play for a championship unless your butts were parked in first place at season’s end. Let’s not forget to put an end to the farce of regular-season interleague play, either. Save that for where it really belongs, the All-Star Game and the World Series.

And won’t it be fun to have something we haven’t really had in this century—namely, real pennant races again. No more of this Bizarro World nonsense of the thrills, spills, and chills of teams fighting to the last breath to finish the season . . . in second place.

Come to think of it, let’s be done at long enough last with those hideous All-Star and City Connect uniforms. They go from ugly to disgusting and back to repulsive before turning nauseating. Haven’t you missed seeing All-Stars wearing their own uniforms, the fatigues of the teams they represent in the game?

And we haven’t arrived until now at the truly fun part. You want to get rid of postseason saturation as much as I do? You want to make the postseason both meaningful and fun again? You want more World Series such as last fall, when a) the only combatants were teams who finished first in their divisions, anyway; and, b) those two went tooth, fang, claw, and anything else they could think of until somebody finally won it? You want to relieve Manfred’s discomfort over the long season?

Of course you do. So . . .

We’ve simplified the game’s alignment to two divisions each for each league. We’ve made for real pennant races again. Now we get to call for best-of-five League Championship Series. That’s the way they played it from divisional play’s birth in 1969 through 1984. Now, you restore the World Series’s primacy by keeping it a best-of-seven. Did I mention that it also means no baseball under snow or November watch anymore?

You also have postseasons of—maximum—seventeen games under the foregoing back-to-the-future remake/remodel. Meaning you have yearly totals of—maximum, again—179 major league games for each league. You can’t tell me that’s not plenty of baseball. And who says an earlier opening to the Hot Stove League won’t be a little more fun, either?

Speaking of which, beware. Maybe the only thing worse than Manfred pondering in-season tournaments would be landing a hard deadline for free agency signing. Athletics outfielder/designated hitter Brent Rooker called it the most anti-player idea Manfred could have. So, naturally, Commissioner Pepperwinkle started stumping for it harder the day after Rooker spoke against it.

“I think there’s going to be some more conversation about it, because I do believe that there’s a marketing opportunity,” Manfred told WFAN. “Let’s face it, we operate in a really competitive environment. Just put entertainment, generally, to one side—just sports, right? It’s really competitive. And I think that you make a mistake, particularly during the offseason, when you don’t take every advantage to push your sport out in front of your fans during that down period.”

Some think you make more of a mistake taking the fun out of the Hot Stove League. For owners and players alike. The owners aren’t saints, but they’re not wholly brainless. The ones who can (will) spend love the chase. The ones who can’t (won’t) spend love to bitch about the ones who can. Fans who kvetch one moment about swelling player dollars cheer the next when their team lands an Alex Bregman.

(By the way, don’t pity the Red Sox for failing to convince Bregman to stay. Not when they seem to have quaked over including a no-trade clause in his new deal but the Cubs had no problem giving him one. Well, there’s still Bo Bichette to whom the Red Sox might turn, within reason.)

“[W]hat they said back was, they thought that kind of [signing] deadline would work to the disadvantage of the players,” Manfred said of player reaction to the idea. “And you know, I just—I don’t put much credence in this.” Shocker.

At least, Manfred promised that any realignment would not include forcing two-team cities into the same division. But the bad news is that, historically, it was easier for pitchers to hold Hall of Famer Rickey (The Man of Steal) Henderson on base than it is to put most commissioners’s promises in the bank.

Who has the next-to-last-laugh now?

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Kyle Tucker

Kyle Tucker’s seventh-inning strikeout seemed to take what remained of the Cubs’ wind away Saturday night. (TBS television capture.)

“It’s really the only inning you could talk about,” lamented Cubs manager Craig Counsell about the top of the sixth, after National League division series Game Five. “We just didn’t do much.

“We had six base runners. You’re going to have to hit homers to have any runs scoring in scenarios like that,” Counsell continued. “They pitched very well. I mean, they pitched super well and we didn’t.”

“They” were the Brewers, whom Counsell used to manage, until he reached managerial free agency and the Cubs decided to dump David Ross for no reason better than that Counsell became available. Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer admitted as much earlier this month.

Two second-place National League Central finishes and one division series loss later, Cub fans could be forgiven if they think it’s been karma for the manner in which Ross was vaporised. The Brewers won Game Five, 3-1, with 90 percent pitching depth, five percent unusual slugging, and maybe five percent karma-the-bitch.

Until, that is, they review the seventh inning in American Family Field Saturday night. First and second, nobody out, and Kyle Tucker—the man for whom the Cubs traded three to the Astros last December, in perhaps the signature moment that explains why they made that trade—coming to the plate.

He faced Aaron Ashby, the nephew of former major league pitcher Andy Ashby, and possibly the best relief pitcher on the Brewers staff. (Regular season: 2.16 ERA; 2.70 fielding-independent pitching rate.) His Cubs were down only 2-1. He got ahead of Ashby three balls, no strikes. Michael Busch (leadoff single) and Nico Hoerner (hit by a pitch) leaned away from second and first itching for a reason to take off.

The odds were in favour of them getting that reason momentarily. Tucker had spent the first three games of the division series as a singles hitter, but in Game Four he finally unloaded, blasting a leadoff home run in the bottom of the seventh. Maybe, despite an early strikeout and a subsequent ground out Saturday night, Tucker’s power strokes were back from the fixit shop.

Big maybe. Ashby pumped a pair of bullets Nolan Ryan himself might have applauded. Tucker swung through both of them.

Then Brewers manager Pat Murphy brought rookie righthander Chad Patrick into the game. Patrick, a righthander with seven minor league seasons behind him and not one Show appearance until the Brewers called him up from AAA Nashville for this year. He got Seiya Suzuki—who’d tied the game at one in the top of the second, when he answered William Contreras’s first-inning solo home run with a bomb of his own against Jacob Misiorowski—to drive one to left that found Jackson Chourio’s glove. He dropped strike three called in on Ian Happ.

Not one Cub came home in that inning or the rest of the way. The Brewers added one more in the seventh, when Brice Turang took Cub reliever Andrew Kitteredge over the right center field fence.

“I was looking up at the heavens to Bob Uecker,” said Brewers general manager Matt Arnold, referencing the beloved late Hall of Fame broadcaster and wit, who’d become as much a face of the Brewers as any player in their history until his passing last January. “Like, during the game, I’m like, ‘Bob, we need you’.”

“I must be in the front row,” Uecker must have said from his roost in the Elysian Fields.

He must have. This team had baseball’s best regular season record this year but entered the division series with a string of failure to get past their first postseason stages for five out of the previous six seasons. They were still recovering from their former closer Devin Williams, now a reliever and frequent hate object (by their own fans) for the Yankees, serving a pitch Mets first baseman Pete Alonso demolished like a munitions expert in the deciding wild card series game last year.

This time, they had to recover from the Cubs, their next-door-state rivals, coming back from a 2-0 game deficit.

This time, they made it. So far.

They have a National League Championship Series date with the Dodgers. They secured the date doing what enough people thought they couldn’t do if it meant paying the ransoms for their kidnapped families: slug. Contreras and Turang were joined by Andrew Vaughn in the fourth, blasting a full-count service from Collin Rea into the left field seats.

They even did it with men who weren’t even topics on last year’s team. Vaughn and Patrick were joined in that club by Misiorowski, who relieved Game Five’s opening closer Trevor Megill, surrendered only Suzuki’s second-inning smash, but otherwise worked spotlessly for his four innings. In what turned out a bullpen battle, the Brewers pen was just that much more efficient than the Cubs pen, which also deployed one starter (Rea) among a group of bulls.

Andrew Vaughn

Vaughn running out his fourth-inning bomb. (TBS television capture.)

And, boy, is the deal that brought Vaughn from the pathetic White Sox to the Brewers looking better every hour. It happened when the Brewers elected to move Aaron Civale from the starting rotation to the bullpen, and Civale responded with a spoken desire to play somewhere else if that was the case. Be careful what you wish for, was the answer . . . and Civale went from a contender to a basement dweller just like that, in early June, with Vaughn—once a first-round draft pick, demoted to the farm a month earlier—coming aboard.

Therein lies a distinction between these Brewers and the Cubs they just turned aside. The Brewers don’t have Cub money, but they don’t let that stop them from constant upgrade searching when necessary. The Cubs have Cub money.  But they’d rather undergo root canal without anesthetic than spend it. And they lack the Brewers’s bargain basement ingenuity. They haven’t yet figured out that you don’t have to shop at the Magnificent Mile all the time. You can find amazing upgrades at Lots 4 Less.

How will these Brewers be perceived going into an NLCS against those Dodgers? Contradictorily, of course. The Brewers swept the Dodgers in their regular-season series, 6-0. But there’ll be more than enough who think the Dodgers will still be the overdogs. Even if the Dodgers’ NLCS ticket was stamped by a horror of a throwing error by Phillies relief pitcher Orion Kerkering in Game Four of their division series.

But how will these Cubs be perceived going into winter vacation? Not too favourably, after all, one fears. The top of their lineup acquitted themselves well enough, particularly Busch with three of his four division series hits clearing the fences and Nico Hoerner with his hits in each game and his team-leading .476 postseason on-base percentage. But the bottom of the lineup disappeared. The collective slash line of the Cubs’ bottom five? .120/.215/.205.

And they’re likely enough to move forward without Tucker, who becomes a free agent and who’s perceived widely enough as thinking about moving on. Even if this usually un-expressive fellow who prefers to let his game do his talking calls it “an honour” to play with this group of Cubs.

That group of Cubs needs a small, not major bullpen remake, and they need to romance and re-sign Tucker, whom they could and should have extended during the second half of the season. But maybe the Cubs need a front-office overhaul, too. The kind that brings in persuaders who can convince the Ricketts family that it’s time to open the purse strings but think about trying Lots 4 Less after that one Magnificent Mile splurge.

Finishing with their best regular-season record since 2018 shouldn’t be enough. Three straight second-place NL Central finishes shouldn’t be enough. But maybe watching the Brewers go forth and tangle honourably with the ogres of the National League West will give these Cubs—and their ownership that’s as endowed as Mercedes-Benz but prefers to drive indiscriminately off the Chicago Auto Warehouse lot—more than a little pause.

The Brewers couldn’t care less for now. They’re enjoying their first postseason series clincher since 2018, the year they shoved the Rockies aside in a division series sweep. And if they wanted any further incentive, they got it from cynics and Cub fans alike who snarked that they hadn’t won a postseason series yet as they took the Cubs on. As if their round-one bye meant squat.

So who has the next-to-last laugh now?

Once upon a time, the early rock and roll era included a novelty hit, “Beep Beep,” in which a little Nash Rambler (I always presumed it to be the anti-classic, two-seat Metropolitan) went tire-to-tire with a Cadillac in a daring little race. The Brewers are the Nash Rambler about to go tire-to-tire with the Dodgers’ Cadillacs.

And, unlike “Beep Beep’s” challenger, they know how to get themselves out of second gear.

Don’t kill the ump, San Diego

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Xander Bogaerts, D.J. Rayburn

This is the pitch umpire D.J. Rayburn called strike three (wrongly) instead of ball four. This was not the reason the Padres lost Game Three of their wild card set against the Cubs Friday.

You know something? I’m probably at the front of the line wishing for Robby the Umpbot’s advent at last.  But don’t even think about trying to tell me the Padres getting nudged out of the postseason by the Cubs is plate umpire D.J. Rayburn’s fault.

Yes, Rayburn absolutely blew what should have been ball four to Xander Bogaerts in the top of the ninth of National League wild card Game Three. The pitch was low, with enough clearance between the ball and the strike zone floor to pass a Frisbee through it.

Yes, Bogaerts absolutely should have been on first. No matter how bright it wasn’t that he slammed his bat to the ground, all but forcing Padres manager Mike Schildt out of the dugout in a flash to keep things from getting worse.

Yes, the Padres absolutely should have had the proper chance to keep their late game revival going, after Jackson Merrill led the inning off with a healthy blast into Wrigley Field’s right field bleachers. That looked even more pointed when Cubs reliever Brad Keller hit the next two batters he faced, Ryan O’Hearn and Bryce Johnson, both on 1-2 counts, forcing Cubs manager Craig Counsell to lift Keller for Andrew Kittredge.

It was still first and second and one out. The Padres didn’t have the bases loaded as they probably should have had, but they still had the tying runs on the pads and a potential tie-breaking run or two due at the plate.

But Jake Cronenworth grounded to shortstop making it second and third. And Freddy Fermin flied one to the back of center field but not far enough to escape being the Padres’ third out of the game and last out of the season.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, not D.J. Rayburn, is what cost the Padres the wild card set and sent the Cubs forth to open their NL division series with a 9-3 loss to the Brewers.

Because all game long, the Padres couldn’t cash in their baserunners with the American Express card. They left eight men on base. They batted six times prior to the ninth with men in scoring position and stranded them. They had no solution for the Cubs’ superior fielding and seemed unable to find holes between those fielders to push or shoot too many balls.

They had second and third in the top of the fifth, when Gavin Sheets singled with one out and Fermin doubled him to third an out later . . . but Fernando Tatis, Jr. flied out to right.

They had Bogaerts on second when he stole the pad an out after he opened the top of the seventh with a base hit . . . and stranded him with a line out to second and a fly out to deep center.

They had Fermin on third in the top of the eighth after his leadoff single turned into taking second on a one-out wild pitch, then taking third on an infield ground out . . . and there he was stranded, on another infield ground out.

Meanwhile, the Cubs ended a faltering Yu Darvish’s start in the top of the second with a bases-loaded single, pushing him out and Jameson Tallion in, and Tallion walked the second Cub run home before getting a strikeout and an inning-ending double play.

From their, the teams traded bullpen shutout innings until Michael Busch led the bottom of the seventh off against Robert Suarez with a blast into the right center field bleachers.

The 3-1 Cubs win may well mean the closing of this group of Padres’ window for postseason triumph. They may have been lucky to get to the wild card series with an offense that led the Show in out-wasting sacrifice bunts but came home 28th in home runs. Their hitters sent 77 out at home, but their pitchers surrendered 86 in the same playpen.

Their biggest names weren’t exactly bombardiers, outside Manny Machado hitting 27 or more for the 10th time in his career. Bogaerts and Merrill missed significant time due to injuries; Bogaerts hit only 11 out and Merrill, 16. Tatis, he who proclaimed himself capable of being the best player in the game last February, settled for 25 bombs on the season and one measly single during the wild card set.

Their pitching may be somewhat suspect going forward, with Darvish likely approaching the end of a career often brilliant and sometimes frustrating, Dylan Cease and Michael King possibly departing as free agents, and Joe Musgrove entering 2026 on the comeback trail from Tommy John surgery.

And who knows what the upshots for the clubhouse and the front office will be as a result of the late owner Peter Seidler’s widow Sheel Seidler’s lawsuit to wrest control of the team from her brothers-in-law? Who knows whether A.J. Preller will be allowed to try wringing out one more miracle or handed his head on a plate in a bid to begin fresh blood injections, considering his contract expires after next season and Seidler isn’t here to have his back?

But don’t lay the blame for this early Padres postseason exit on Rayburn. He certainly did blow that crucial ninth-inning call, but he wasn’t the man at the plate turning all those Padre runners into castaways.

Robby the Umpbot wasn’t the end of the world

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Robby the Umpbot

The first MLB deployment of Robby the Umpbot–Cubs pitcher Cody Poteet getting a ball call turned to a strike against the Dodgers’ Max Muncy.

Cody Poteet. Remember the name of this Cubs righthanded pitcher. No, he didn’t surrender three World Series home runs to Babe Ruth in the same game, he didn’t try to start a World Series game the day after pitching four innings in relief, and he didn’t pitch a no-hitter in which he got credit for such a performance despite his defense recording every last out in the game.*

No, Poteet was first on the mound to call for—and win—a ball/strike challenge with aid and comfort from Robby the Umpbot. Even if it was in a spring training exhibition game.

Poteet had Mookie Betts aboard and nobody out in the bottom of the first when he threw Max Muncy a fastball at the knees on 0-1. Home plate umpire Tony Randazzo called it ball one. Poteet said, “Not so fast” . . . and called immediately for Robby the Umpbot’s help. Well, now. The videoboard showed the pitch most certainly did hit the strike zone by the rule book. 0-1 went to 1-1. Muncy ended up looking at strike three not far from the same knee-high location.

Know what happened after that? How about what didn’t happen?

The sky didn’t fall. The earth didn’t move, under their feet or anyone else’s. There were no known tidal waves reported on any world coastline. Donald Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden didn’t suddenly become men of reason and wisdom. The flora and the fauna didn’t make mass entries on the endangered species lists.

About the only unlikely thing to happen from that overturned ball call was the Cubs going forth to batter the world champion Dodgers, 12-4, to open spring exhibition season. They turned a 3-0 Dodger lead after two into a six-run third, added two in the fifth, one in the seventh, and three in the eighth. The only Dodger response was an eighth-inning RBI double.

You might be happy to know that Poteet had an ally on his call for Robby’s review: Muncy himself. “When that ball crossed, I thought it was a strike right away and he balled it,” the Dodger third baseman said postgame. “I look out there and he’s tapping his head and I went, ‘Well, I’m going to be the first one’.”

And, just as with the advent of replay elsewhere, guess what else didn’t happen? The game itself wasn’t delayed unconscionably. Muncy certainly didn’t think so. In fact, he doesn’t mind Robby at all. Neither did Randazzo, seemingly.

“It’s a cool idea,” Muncy said. “It doesn’t slow the game down at all. It moves fast. The longest part was Tony trying to get the microphone to work in the stadium.” Meaning, Randazzo announcing the ruling to the Camelback Ranch crowd.

Come the eighth inning, the Cubs called for another challenge. This time, catcher Pablo Aliendo thought Frankie Scalzo, Jr.’s sweeper nicked the top edge of the zone for strike three with Sean McClain at the plate. Not quite, Robby ruled this time. Ball four.

The rule for deploying the automated ball/strike system (ABS), as it’s called officially, is that only three on the field (pitcher, catcher, or batter) can call for Robby’s opinion and each team gets only two challenges thus far. If the challenging team wins, as the Cubs did, they keep the challenge. When the system was brought online in the minors, the estimates became that the average such challenge was (wait for it!) seventeen seconds.

Neither Poteet nor Muncy were new to Robby, according to The Athletic‘s Fabian Ardaya. Poteet started ten times in the Yankee organisation last year, at Scranton-Wilkes Barre; Muncy saw it while on a rehab assignment off a wrist injury. Muncy’s only issue then was, as he put it to Ardaya, “the technology wasn’t entirely there.”

There’d be certain pitches that you would see and you’d look up on the board and it’d have it in a completely different spot . . . Even the catcher would come back and be like, ‘Yeah, that’s not where that ball was.’ The technology isn’t 100 percent there, but the idea of it’s really cool.

Critics (they were legion) feared Robby the Umpbot would penalise too many solid umpires while punishing not enough errant ones. One conclusion Robby’s early works has stirred is a revelation that might be just as jarring, as The Wall Street Journal‘s Jared Diamond puts it: the players themselves, from the mound to the plate, don’t know the strike zone as well as they think.

“Unlike the replay rules already in place, where managers initiate appeals from the dugout after having time to deliberate,” Diamond writes, “ball-strike challenges have two key differences: They can only come from the pitcher, catcher or batter—and they must happen immediately.

“The result is a format that inserts elements of both strategy and personality into the game even while adding automation. That’s because ultracompetitive, often emotional professional athletes aren’t always particularly good at knowing the right time to ask for a challenge.”

On-field embarrassment comes in infinite forms. Dodgers pitcher Landon Knack, who got knuked by the Mets in last fall’s National League Championship Series, told Diamond of times during his AAA-level days when he challenged pitches from frustration and regretted them at once. “All Knack could do,” Diamond writes, “was stand on the mound and watch the scoreboard animation showing the location of the ball, as everybody in the stadium saw that he was embarrassingly wrong.”

It’s something along the line of the store manager calling la policía after showing up at the bank without the bag full of the day’s cash proceeds, only to double back and realise he or she dropped the bank bag in the parking lot on the way to the car—with the whole thing caught on the store’s security cameras.

Other kinks in the system may well include the choice of players who get to call Robby for help. Diamond says AAA-level managers and players agree on the one who shouldn’t: the pitchers. Knack himself admits, “Pitchers are horrible at it.” Said a Dodgers AAA catcher, Hunter Feduccia, “We probably had a 90 percent miss rate with all the pitchers last year.” Admitted a Royals AAA pitcher, Chandler Champlain, “Being biased as a pitcher, I think anything close is a strike.”

Advises Jayson Stark, The Athletic‘s Hall of Fame writer, “Don’t be That Guy whose heat-of-the-moment challenge decisions leave your teammates shaking their heads and calling you names you won’t want to see displayed above your locker. Be smart. Be cool. Be thoughtful. And control those emotions!”

(Some hitters have been known to have dubious strike zone sense, too. Once upon a time, Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra had an impeccable strike zone sense behind the plate . . . and a notorious lack of it at the plate. Maybe the best bad-ball hitter of his time, Berra was questioned postgame about a pitch nowhere near the strike zone or even Yankee Stadium’s postal code that he’d smashed for a home run regardless. Bless his heart, Yogi insisted the pitch was a letter-high strike.)

Relax. Robby’s getting a spring training Show tryout only for now. He’s not expected to spread his wings over the regular season Show until 2026 at minimum.

But if the only kinks in the system other than coordinated calibrations thus far are figuring out who should make the challenges and who shouldn’t, you’d have to say Robby’s going to be in good shape and the umpires are going to be in better shape. (They’ll get immediate reminders of the rule book, as opposed to the “individual” strike zone.) And, the game is going to be in the best shape.

* For the record, the Cub pitchers who delivered those non-feats were, in order, Charlie Root (1932), Hank Borowy (1945), and Ken Holtzman (1969).

This essay was written for and first published by Sports Central.