The Orioles ABS strategy is hanging their pitchers out to dry

As the season has gone on, the sample size around how each team uses the new ABS challenge system has gotten larger, and at two and a half months, enough challenges have been made to paint a pretty clear picture of the various ABS strategies around the league. Looking at the Baseball Savant Statcast data on ABS challenges, the Orioles ABS strategy stands out as unique and, upon further examination, bad.

First and foremost, the Orioles are not using ABS enough. The Orioles rank 29th in baseball in challenges attempted with just 130. With the Orioles having played 74 games this year, that means they average less than two attempted challenges per game. You are allowed to get two challenges wrong per game, but if you don't use them, they don't roll over; they just go away. Almost every game, the Orioles are just leaving potentially valuable challenges on the table because they are trying to save them for a magical, perfect moment when they can use the challenge as the perfect high-leverage situation to get the maximum value from it. That moment just doesn't happen in most games or even most weeks. So they end up saving these challenges for nothing.

The Orioles are bad at using the ABS challenge system and it's costing them games

So far this season, the Orioles have only overturned 63 calls total. Again, with 74 games played, that's less than one overturn per game. The umpires have not been that good when officiating the Orioles.

The implementation of the ABS system provides teams with the valuable opportunity to fix blown calls and flip counts into their favor. It's an opportunity that previous generations would have done anything to have, and this Orioles team is just saying "no thank you".

Once you get past the lack of usage, the way they’re using it is also poor. When you look at how teams divide up their challenge usage between their hitters and their catchers, there are several teams that appear to be very intentionally saving their challenges for their catchers. There are many teams that have a near 50/50 split, and there is one team whose offense has challenges 20+ more pitches than their defense. That's the Orioles.  

The Orioles have attempted 76 offensive challenges, of which they have won 39, compared to just 54 defensive challenges, of which they have won 24.

Over the course of ABS testing, the minor league catchers stood out as being way better at challenging than any other group. That being the case, many of the smartest teams in the league have decided that they want their catchers to make more challenges than anyone else. 28 of the MLB teams have their catcher challenge more than the Orioles, and 14 of those 28 teams have an overturn rate better than 60%. That's remarkably efficient, and clearly those teams are getting a lot of value out of ABS.

The Orioles, on the other hand, rarely have their catchers challenge, and when they do, they are the worst in the league at challenging, with a 44% overturn rate.

In a post-game press conference, after Samuel Basallo got Trevor Rogers out of a tough inning with a challenge, Craig Albernaz admitted they tell their catchers not to be aggressive with the ABS system. Clearly, that attitude has had the downstream effect of making them really bad at them.

The Orioles hitters are average at ABS, but the ratio of how they are using it is all off. This should be a pitching defense tool that the hitters sometimes use to reverse egregious missed calls, not the other way around.

With how much the Orioles pitching staff has struggled all year, they could use 74 overturned calls like the Marlins have gotten for their pitchers. There have been lots of at-bats this year where an umpire misses a called strike three and Adley Rutschman does the pause and the slow throw back to the mound, which means that he disagrees with a call but no challenge. It would help the pitchers so much if the Orioles catchers actually challenged every call they thought was wrong instead of just pouting behind the plate. In the past, pouting was all you could do as a catcher; now you have a recourse. Use it!

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