Poteets catcher, Reese McGuire, had to reach back across his body to get it.
He called the pitch a ball.
Poteet didnt have to accept the umpires opinion, and he didnt.
Photo illustration by Matthew Cooley. Photograph in illustration by Michael Owens/MLB Photos/Getty Images
Utilizing new rules being tested at spring training this year, Poteet challenged the call.
It was a strike.
You feel like you made history?
a reporter asked Poteet after he was pulled from the game.
He was standing in a media scrum at the time, and everyone laughed at the question.
Every strike matters, Poteet said.
And predictably, traditionalists have raged, shouting at both Manfred and the clouds.
I was probably against 80 percent of the things that they rolled out.
In the test games, each team will get two challenges.
But calling it a test doesnt capture the epic road that baseball has traveled to get to this point.
The Atlantic League is an independent operation, which at the time had just eight teams.
About 6,000 people attended.
That night in the ballpark, Sword expressed optimism in his remarks to the media.
He said it was an exciting night for baseball, historic even.
But privately, he and others at Major League Baseball soon had concerns.
Players quickly got angry.
We had a player actually turn around and yell at the radar.
But instead of giving up, baseball officials went to work.
Like any great baseball story, the narrative around automated balls and strikes is an underdog tale.
It required a comeback.
It needed late-inning heroics.
He wasnt a star.
Morgan Sword didnt even play college baseball.
Now, Sword and a team of people in MLBs front office are poised to change the game forever.
But this zone has changed over the years.
Sometimes, it morphsover the course of a game.
It can even, some hitters contend, change based on whether an ump likes them or not.
Umpire Lee Weyer had a certain zone (huge).
You better swing, but you knew that.
Still, there are arguments and misses.
OneBoston University researcher foundin recent years that home plate umpires miss the call roughly 20 percent of the time.
And hitters say that the umpires job is only getting harder.
I think its a really hard job.
Manfreds answer at the time was simple: No, not yet.
But by the summer of 2019 the season of the Atlantic League tests that was changing.
And the next two years ushered in three developments that would alter the course of baseball history.
And Major League Baseball itself changed.
It assumed control over the minor leagues.
Manfred could now test any rule he wanted in the minors.
SWORD UNDERSTOOD THE strike zone; he was a catcher in high school.
But he acquired his most important skills off the field, in college.
I was fresh off readingMoneyball, Sword recalls.
And I was just fascinated by the whole premise of the book.
But OConnor soon realized that Sword was different than most 18-year-olds.
You could tell quickly that he could handle more, OConnor says.
After graduation, Swords resume impressed Manfred enough that he hired him at Major League Baseball.
Manfred liked Swords quantitative approach and didnt hesitate to put Sword in charge of the rule-change operation.
He believed in Sword and his young team of front-office free thinkers.
Maybe they needed to stop thinking about the zone as a three-dimensional box, they said.
Maybe it was a linear plane, floating vertically in space over the plate.
A pitch would have to pass through this zone to be called a strike.
But that still left a lot of problems to solve.
At another point, they set the height of the zone too low, and pitchers complained.
And then there was the issue of how to employ the technology at scale.
The good news was, Goltz knew it would work.
The bad news was, Major League Baseball wasnt sure how best to use it.
For two years, the league went fully automated.
This system gave birth to a term that Manfred, Sword, and the umpires themselves didnt appreciate.
Reporters dubbed the officials robo-umps a moniker that diminished the umpires craft.
More problematic, perhaps: Most players in the minor leagues didnt like the fully automated option.
The automated system didnt care about art.
And baseball ran into other unexpected issues.
But because the system was making the calls, the umpire couldnt do anything.
His hands were tied, Dreyer says.
The final score was 22-3, and the game went on forever.
Thanks to feedback like this, baseball began testing a system that was a little different.
Teams got two or three challenges per game, a model that proved to be far more popular.
Minor-league managers and players can all point to an exact moment when a game changed on a challenge.
Horwitz, who is now with the Pittsburgh Pirates, remembers being excited that day.
Theres a feeling in the box when you challenge one, Horwitz says.
Youre like, Ooooh, maybe its not there or maybe it is?
It changes your whole day, Toglia says.
And Chad Tracy, the manager of the Worcester Red Sox, knows the feeling.
His team won a game against the Norfolk Tides in 2023 on back-to-back challenges in the ninth.
We struck out Daz Cameron, Tracy recalls, play-by-play style.
He challenges the call.
We think the games over.
They overturn it, so now we have to continue pitching.
We struck him out again.
He challenges it again.
This time, ABS confirms it was a strike.
The game was over, and in Tracys memory, the crowd went wild.
It was intense, he says, because everybody thinks the games over twice.
BASEBALL PURISTS CAN and will debate whether endings like these are good for the game.
But Manfred knows how he feels about the technology in general.
The Hawk-Eye technology churned out the image.
It was just spring training, a scrimmage, but it had mattered.
That one call, Poteet later said, totally changes the dynamic of the whole at-bat.
The game quickly got away from the Dodgers.
The technology had worked and not much else had changed or maybe everything had.
