Jason Benetti did not need much time to sum up a pitch that home plate umpire Roberto Ortiz missed during the Detroit Tigers-Atlanta Braves game. After Bryce Elder threw a pitch down the middle and Ortiz called it a ball, Braves catcher Drake Baldwin tapped his helmet for a challenge, the replay showed a strike, and the call was overturned into a strikeout.
“It is….. Yikes,” Benetti said after watching the replay. He added, “It is the reason for the challenge system.”
The moment landed because the Automated Ball-Strike challenge system is built for exactly this kind of miss, and it only gives each team two challenges per game. If the challenge is successful, the team keeps it. That matters in games like this one, when a pitch that looked centered to the eye can still hinge the inning on whether the umpire got it right.
Benetti was not speaking into a vacuum. Ortiz’s work has been under a microscope before, including a Royals-Pirates game in 2024 in which he missed 30 calls and finished with an 82.5% accuracy rate, and a Brewers-Padres game in September 2025 in which he missed 25 calls. In 2026, he is about 92.8% accurate, with -5 correct calls above expectation, while the league average sits between 93 and 94 percent and overall umpiring accuracy is about 93.5 percent.
That is why the challenge system has become more than a novelty. More than half of challenged pitches are being overturned, which means teams are finding real value in saving their limited challenges for the pitches that matter most. The system does not eliminate human error, but it does expose it fast, and this one ended the way the replay was designed to end: with a strike restored and the batter out.
Benetti had been around this kind of baseball before. He and Steve Stone were shown in the broadcast booth at U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago on May 20, 2016, and years later his reaction to the Tigers-Braves replay sounded like someone who has watched enough baseball to know when the rule is doing the work the game needs it to do. On this night, the challenge system did not just correct a call. It made the case for itself.
