Guardians biggest ABS struggle is costing them dearly and will kill them in postseason

A classic Cleveland Guardians win is a beautiful thing. It’s built on a foundation of "playing baseball their way: Grinding through tough plate appearances, moving runners over, and coming through with that clutch, situational base hit.

They don't beat themselves.

Except right now, they are. And it’s happening in a way nobody really anticipated before the season started: the new Automated Ball-Strike challenge system.

Major League Baseball handed managers and players a brand-new strategic weapon this year, and while some teams are managing it well, the Guardians are treating it like a shotgun. We see the numbers, and they paint a pretty ugly picture of how they are handling the technology.

Guardians ABS missteps have made next organizational change crystal clear

High volume, low precision

The disparity in how often the Guardians challenge versus how often they're actually right is staggering. Look at where the Guardians rank across the big leagues:

Challenge Rate: 5.1% (Eighth-highest rate in MLB)
Challenge Success Rate: 39% (second-worst mark in MLB)

Cleveland is incredibly trigger-happy, yet they have an elite knack for being wrong. To put it into raw numbers, Guardians hitters and pitchers have launched 179 total challenges this season but won just 80 of them.

Because of that deficit, the Guardians currently sit at a brutal -29 net overturns (successful challenges made by the Guardians minus successful challenges made against them).

In a sport where the margins between a division crown and missing the playoffs are razor-thin, giving away nearly 30 missed calls is a massive unforced error.

When you look under the hood of these numbers, it’s not hard to spot where the problem lies. The success the Guardians do have is completely concentrated within their veteran leadership.

In fact, Austin Hedges, Patrick Bailey, and Brayan Rocchio are the only players on the active roster who are putting together a "successful" challenge season (winning more than they lose). They understand the zone, they know how the tracking reads the edges and they don't panic.

The rest of the roster? It’s a parade of young players letting their frustration dictate their behavior. The Guardians have a high number of emotional challenges coming from their younger bats and arms, and their success rate is absolutely cratering.

Wasting ammo in the early innings

The biggest issue isn't just that the kids are wrong; it's when they are choosing to be wrong.
Too many of these failed challenges are coming in the first, second, and third innings on marginal pitches with nobody on base.

By burning through their two allotted misses before the stadium even smells like hot dogs, the Guardians are completely stripping themselves of the ability to challenge when the game is actually on the line.

Imagine getting to the eighth or ninth inning in a one-run game, bases loaded, full count, and the umpire misses a blatant pitch off the plate. You want to tap your helmet and fix the call, but you can't, because a rookie struck out looking in the second inning and burned your last bullet on an obvious strike. It’s bad situational awareness.

Right now, the Guardians are fighting through a minefield of injuries. With such a shorthanded roster, they need every single competitive advantage they can get. Wasting opportunities in low-leverage situations is simply not a sustainable way to succeed.

It is time for Stephen Vogt to step in and implement a team rule: No challenging before the sixth inning unless it is an absolute emergency.

Until the younger players can prove they have a consistent feel for how the automated zone judges the edges, the training wheels need to go back on. The Guardians pride themselves on being a smart, disciplined baseball team, and it's time for them to show that discipline when it comes to challenges.

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Follow