NEW YORK, New York – A whistleblower has shed light on the new baseball umpiring system, and it’s all about the Money. Apparently, according to an unnamed source (whose identity is being protected for obvious reasons), the new Major League Baseball Automated Ball-Strike System, or ABS, will be an actual robot doing the umpiring and further, that robot has a secret mode that can be bought as an upgrade for a very high price.

Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that the ABS would be in play starting in the 2026 season. A high-tech camera will track every pitch, and each team can challenge a total of two ball-strike calls per game, with the possibility of additional challenges if their calls are successful. (In other words, a successful challenge would keep the team’s total at 1 or 2.) Not just anyone can challenge an umpire’s call: It has to be the pitcher, catcher, or batter. In addition, a team that has fewer than two challenges remaining at the start of extra innings will get one more challenge.

Reactions to the announcement were predictably mixed, with traditionalists decrying yet another alteration to “the pastoral game,” as many fans of the games’ early days like to call it. One longtime fan said, “Look, it really hasn’t been the same since the ball went live, so really what’s one more catastrophic change?”

On the other hand came cheers from fans of the high-tech cameras already in play that regularly show umpires getting calls wrong, with one wry commentator noting that instituting the ABS would be cheaper than keeping the umpires in up-to-date eyeglass prescriptions.

But it was the secret memo that somehow made its way into the hands of our mysterious source that blew the lid off the “update.” According to the memo, which had the approval of a majority of baseball team owners, it won’t be human umpires calling the balls and strikes but human-like robots, which have been programmed to be as realistic as possible, including sounding and making gestures just like humans do. (The “you’re outta here” gesture is said to be particularly lifelike.)

The really controversial element of the robot behind home plate is that it has a mode that governs its operations, and the programmers who wrote the code based those operations on real umpires. Apparently, the robot umpire will have two modes, the Harry Wendelstedt mode and the Angel Hernandez mode. The former was one of the game’s most respected umpires, with a 97-percent correct-call rate; the latter was one of baseball’s most controversial figures, routinely inflaming fans of just about every team by missing calls (as backed up by high-tech cameras) and then, even in the era of instant replay, refusing to admit that he was wrong. As it happens, Hernandez left the game only in 2024, with baseball paying out his remaining salary, and part of his payout was a secret clause that gave MLB the right to use him as a model for this new robot umpire. And according to the secret memo, teams can pay an astronomical per-game fee to guarantee that the Wendelstedt mode is “on” all the time. That fee won’t be affordable to small-market teams, which will have to make do with a coin flip at the start of every game deciding whether it’s Robot Wendelstedt or Robot Hernandez behind the plate.

MLB officials have so far not commented.