Bill Miller went 0-for-8 on ABS challenges at Wrigley on Friday and I need the entire “protect the human element” industrial complex to sit with that number until it hurts.
Reds 10, Cubs 8. Forget the final. Eight challenges. Eight overturns. A 27-year veteran and crew chief posted the cleanest goose egg of the ABS era while a matinee crowd watched Hawk-Eye treat his zone like a practice dummy. Nine plate appearances in, Rhett Lowder threw an 0-1 four-seamer on the corner. Miller called ball. Challenge. Strike. By the ninth inning the ledger was perfect and ugly: Cubs took five, Reds took three, and only two of the eight pitches had even started life as strikes.
Carson Kelly challenged four by himself. Jose Trevino got two. Sal Stewart and Seiya Suzuki each flipped one as hitters. Tyler Stephenson, the league leader with 88 successful overturns on 124 challenges, initiated exactly zero. When the best challenge artist in baseball is just watching, the zone is not subtle.
I already hear the comments loading. Hard job. Different stances. Split-second reads. Different heights. Save it. The camera does not grade on a curve.
The Difficult-Job Speech Just Got Its Own Overturn
Sal Stewart actually beat one of those challenges and still ran cover for the fraternity. At the All-Star Game he told The Athletic, “These umpires have a really, really, really difficult job. I only have to know my zone; they need to know the whole league’s zone. … I just want to say, man, the umpires have done a great job. This system, it’s not easy. They have to know a lot of people, different heights.”
Classy quote. Completely irrelevant to an 0-for-8. Difficulty is the last talking point traditional media reaches for when the graphics board is laughing at a crew chief in high definition. Stewart is right that the job is hard. He is wrong if he thinks hardness is a shield when eight straight pitches get corrected in public. The system is not supposed to be easy on the umpire. It is supposed to be accurate. Friday it was.
Miller sits ninth on the season with 70 overturned calls. Hunter Wendelstedt, Dan Iassogna, Malachi Moore, Lance Barrett and Manny Gonzalez are ahead of him. This was not some fringe fill-in melting down. This was a mid-pack regular having the worst blank since the challenge system went live for the regular season. Same day Allen Porter went 11-of-13 and Edwin Moscoso 7-of-9. Clint Vondrak still owns the single-game high at 11-of-16 from June. The technology is not picking on Bill Miller. It is simply done pretending.
Challenge Baseball Is Expensive Theater
MLB sold the challenge system as the perfect middle. Keep the human first call. Let the robots clean the edges. Two challenges a side, keep them if you win, preserve the soul. I bought some of that pitch in spring. I am done now. When a crew chief goes blank for nine innings, the “human element” is not atmosphere. It is dead air with a scoreboard animation attached.
The Reds already had a Miller chapter this summer. Edwin Arroyo collided with him on a grounder in July, the inning stretched, and Caleb Ferguson unloaded on the hot mic. Ferguson apologized the next day: “It’s just a very unprofessional thing on my part. I know these things happen in the game, but I don’t like that I was kind of the centerpiece of what was going on.” Different mess. Same umpire living inside Cincinnati’s year. The ABS ledger is the one that actually sticks.
I keep coming back to the design choice. We already built the machine that is better at the job. Then we made the machine raise its hand and ask permission. That is not tradition. That is cosplay with better cameras. Full ABS ends the debate in one rule change. The challenge system exists so the union and the nostalgics can keep arguing about aura while the graphics department does the real work.
Miller did not invent umpire error. He just gave the 2026 season its cleanest single-game receipt. Zero-for-eight. Two original strike calls in the whole pile. A veteran who has worked the biggest stages getting corrected like a rookie on the edges. The next broadcaster who frames this as an assault on the soul of baseball can explain which of those eight pitches was carrying the soul. The rest of us already saw the call. Eight times.
