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# Analysis: What Does Cal Raleigh Non-Challenge Mean for Mariners ABS Strategy?
- URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/seattle-mariners-cal-raleigh-non-challenge-abs-strategy/
- Published: 2026-03-27T23:55:53.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T06:15:25.000Z
- Author: Callaghan Bluechel
- Tags: Analysis, Mariners, Cal Raleigh, Dan Wilson

[Embed from Getty Images](https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/2268551628?ref=emeraldcityspectrum.com)

Use it or lose it. That’s a phrase that applies to many things in life: youth, a second language, differential calculus, Mark Knopfler’s finger-picking technique, and as of the beginning of the 2026 Major League Baseball season, your team’s two Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system challenges.

Here are the rules: each team gets two ABS challenges for balls and strikes that must be used immediately after any pitch is thrown. If a challenge is unsuccessful, one challenge is taken away from that team. If a team is out of challenges by the beginning of any extra inning, they get one more.

On Thursday night in Seattle, the Cleveland Guardians offered two challenges: one by catcher Bo Naylor to overturn a 2-2 ball call and strike out Cole Young in the bottom of the fifth inning, and the other a failed challenge by left fielder Steven Kwan after a 1-2 Logan Gilbert slider veered back onto the strike zone at the last gasp. 

The Mariners didn’t use any.

Not even when Cal Raleigh saw a 2-2 slider from Erik Sabrowski get called for a punchout. It was a couple inches outside and he visibly considered tapping his helmet to make the challenge, but ultimately walked back to the dugout.

In the bottom of the eighth inning with no outs and the Mariners down by one. Thanks to a mess of contradictory reporting, Raleigh was one of the few Mariners who everyone knew *could* challenge. And yet he didn’t.

“Looking back, yeah, I should have done it. I didn’t think it was that far off,” Raleigh said. “It was off, but it is what it is. You learn from it, and I’m sure we’ll get more accustomed to it as the year goes on.”

Raleigh and the Mariners could be said to have entered the season with a disadvantage in ABS experience due to Raleigh’s time spent in the World Baseball Classic. But the Guardians’ Naylor was also away for Team Canada, and he and his team seemed very willing to use the system.

It is certainly possible that, like a lot of things, the optimal strategy will end up being a lot more aggressive than the instincts of many teams, managers, and players in this league. This is certainly true of the Mariners, though I don’t know if Raleigh’s decision to not challenge was his instinct or if it was him suppressing his instinct (I suspect the latter). 

The perhaps more worrying thing was that, before the game, reports came out that the Mariners were only allowing Cal Raleigh and Mitch Garver to challenge, in any situation. Manager Dan Wilson denied this after the game, so perhaps someone down the pipe misreported the fact that the team’s *pitchers* won’t be making challenges. This restriction makes sense, as it is hard for a pitcher to see the exact location he’s hitting as he’s tumbling laterally off the mound. 

If the M’s are restricting hitters, that’s *profoundly* misguided. During Spring Training, batters were successful on 405 (45.7%) of their 887 challenges. The break-even point varies by count, runners on base, outs (those three combine for 288 basic inning states) and leverage, but in a lot of cases, it’s quite a bit lower than 45.7%. Given that Wilson outright denied this, Seattle is probably allowing its batters to challenge.

Back to the break-even point. What that means for catchers and hittersis that they should be thinking in terms of probabilities for their challenges. They probably won’t all memorize the perfect strategy chart by situation (okay, Josh Naylor might), but they’ll be developing skills of when to increase their range of challenges: in some situations, a player should challenge when he thinks he has a 50/50 or higher chance of being right, in others, he should challenge more loosely or more tightly. 

In Raleigh’s case, we can use run expectancy for all 288 ball-strike-base-out states to conclude that the gap between 3-2 with no outs and no one on and 0-0 with one out and nobody on is **0.3 runs** on average. The run value of losing a challenge is roughly -**0.2 runs**, so the break-even point is **40%** in that situation \[1\] - meaning Raleigh should challenge in that situation if he thinks he estimates a *40% or greater chance of succeeding* \- and that’s inning-agnostic! In the eighth inning of a one-run game with both challenges remaining, the break-even mark is probably even lower. 

\[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="693"\]

![  Inning state ABS challenge break-even point chart    courtesy of Tom Tango    on the Tangotiger blog. The percentages are to be read as “how sure you should be in order to make the challenge”  not  “how often you should challenge.”  ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/re288-abs-break-even-point-format-original-2.png)

Inning state ABS challenge break-even point chart courtesy of Tom Tango on the Tangotiger blog. The percentages are to be read as “how sure you should be in order to make the challenge” not “how often you should challenge.” \[/caption\]

The above perfect strategy chart accounts for all 288 inning states to estimate the break-even point when it comes to run value for the inning, though it doesn’t take into account general game state information like score and inning. As you can imagine, the break-even rate is lower for full counts and with men on and much higher for low counts with nobody on; greater potential payoffs mean challengers can and should take on longer odds.

But because it doesn’t incorporate the current game state, the perfect strategy chart is imperfect. We can call it an imperfect strategy chart. But it’s close enough to the true perfect strategy chart (which, to be clear, would have *tens of thousands* \[2\]of values, but much fewer with meaningful differences to remember) where the expected value calculation would be based on outright win expectancy rather than run expectancy. And players will instinctively gear their challenges towards the higher leverage innings anyway.

For the Mariners, the lesson from Opening Day should be that errors of omission are just as bad as those of commission. This goes for a whole lot of things in the game, from ABS challenges to fly balls that weren’t run down. At this early juncture, the players are still learning to remember its presence when faced with a tough call.

“It is new obviously for everybody,” Dan Wilson said. “I think maybe it doesn’t jump to the forefront of the mind all the time when you’re in the box. But again, it’s part of the game now and something definitely we will use.”

After all, you don’t get any reward for keeping challenges to the end of the game. Use it or lose it, adapt or die, fortune favors the bold and all that. Or, as poker strategists would tell you, fortune favors the selectively bold tight-aggressive player who memorizes strategy charts. Something tells me that wouldn’t have fit Vergil’s dactylic hexameter.

\[1\] The equation 0.2/*x* \+ 0.2 = *y* can be used to figure out the break-even point *y* from the run expectancy of a successful challenge *x*. This can be used to reach all of the values on the perfect strategy chart, given run expectancy values for each inning state.

\[2\] Technically infinite because the number of run leads and deficits is technically infinite, but even taking just 13 such values (from up by six through down by six), multiplying by 18 for each half-inning (extra innings would have the same calculations as ninth innings) and multiplying by the 288 inning states gives *67,392* individual values. Even a chart that combines the first six innings and doesn’t differentiate between any leads greater than three runs would still have 20,736 values to remember.