ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — One week into the season, the Yankees looked like they were going to be the league’s best exploiting the automated ball-strike system.
A week later, their hitters have looked like the league’s worst challengers.
Aaron Boone chalked that up to the “ebb and flow” of the new ABS system, but the Yankees have not been particularly sharp at it of late, both in their actual success rates and some of when they have decided to tap their helmets.
“Being great at this is not, ‘We’re great at 80 percent,’ ” Boone said before the Yankees lost their fourth straight to the Rays in extras on Saturday at Tropicana Field. “It’s the right amount of volume, having that good sense of calls. So it’s nuanced and everyone’s a little bit different.”
Through their first five games of the season, Yankees hitters went 8-for-10 in successfully overturning strikes to balls. In nine games since, though, they were just 2-for-13 — the last few games of unsuccessful challenges standing out in particular because they coincided with the group’s overall offensive rut.
In Friday’s 5-3 loss to the Rays, they ran out of challenges by the top of the fifth inning. Jazz Chisholm Jr. had an unsuccessful tap on an 0-0 count with one out and no one on in the fourth inning of a 3-2 game and then an inning later, José Caballero challenged the first pitch of the frame and was proved wrong. Saturday, Yankees hitters didn’t challenge once.
“We’re told to be aggressive and use them,” catcher Austin Wells said. “I think you can always hindsight and look back and think, ‘Oh man, I should have maybe not used it there.’ But they tell us to be aggressive and use it when we think it’s a ball. There’s been some really, really close ones that haven’t gone our way. But I think that’s just the game.”
Boone has in fact preached being aggressive to his team, but he has also said he wants them to get to a place where understanding leverage becomes instinctual — which is where he seemed to disagree with Friday’s challenges.
“We, just like the umpires, are going to be needing to make adjustments throughout the year,” said Ben Rice, who had a pair of bad challenges during the series against the Marlins. “Of course having understanding of situations, when to challenge and when not to. But at the end of the day, it’s just kind of a gut feeling.”
During spring training, Boone said he was direct with players in telling them they had either made a good or bad challenge. That has carried over into the regular season, as he indicated Saturday he had made his feelings known with Caballero (in a light way) after his rough one Friday night.
Overall, Yankees hitters entered Saturday 10-for-23 in ABS challenges — a success rate of 43.5 percent, which was the ninth lowest in the majors. Their 13 unsuccessful challenges were the most in the majors, but their 10 successful challenges were also the second most.
Chisholm and Caballero both had three unsuccessful challenges, though Caballero was 2-for-5 while Chisholm was 1-for-4.
Trent Grisham led the club with three successful challenges.
“I predicted all this coming out of [spring training] — there’s going to be noisy weeks where it’s like, ‘Ohh,’ ” Boone said. “The last thing I want is our guys to get gun-shy. I want us to be smart. I want us to continue to learn where it becomes reactionary, instinctive. There’s going to be weeks where you have not a great umpire, not a great receiver back there that you have a lot of opportunities to challenge. There’s going to be nights when you don’t. There’s going to be nights when you have a few and it doesn’t fall in a leverage spot. So there’s a lot of things that goes into the noise of the day to day.
“I think we’re going to be good at this. We’ve had a few this week that haven’t been great. But it also had nothing to do with us losing a game [Friday] night.”
