A's get burned by rare ABS glitch in loss to Yankees

The Athletics were burned by a rare ABS glitch Saturday night when Tyler Soderstrom’s 2-0 pitch in the fourth inning was confirmed as a strike even though replay showed Ryan Weathers’ pitch missed the zone by 0.8 inches.

Soderstrom challenged immediately, believing the pitch was low. After a short delay, home plate umpire Adam Beck announced the call was confirmed, and the A’s lost the challenge. The replay shown later from the dugout iPad made the mistake plain: the pitch should have been a ball.

The miscue mattered because the automated ball-strike challenge system is supposed to catch obvious errors, not create new ones. In this case, the practical damage was limited because Soderstrom later drew a walk in the at-bat anyway. But Oakland still surrendered a challenge, and the episode exposed a larger problem inside baseball’s tech-assisted officiating: the game can look more precise on paper while the chain of communication behind the call remains murky.

A’s manager Mark Kotsay said the umpires told him the call had been confirmed using information from the controller of the ABS system, yet the replay available to the dugout showed the pitch had missed. Kotsay said he tried to raise the issue between innings but could not get the challenge back. His frustration pointed to the same fault line that has shadowed replay for years: when the technology, the umpire and the dugout all work from different information at different moments, accountability gets harder to pin down.

For Major League Baseball, the incident was a small but pointed test case. The league has spent years moving toward more automated and data-driven adjudication, hoping to reduce the kind of missed calls that can swing games and inflame fan distrust. But an ABS miss that ends with the wrong verdict, even by less than an inch, does the opposite of what the system promises. It reminds teams and fans that automation is only as good as the accuracy of the data, the reliability of the transmission and the rules governing who sees what before the decision becomes final.