For San Francisco Giants fans, the finish to Game 2 of the World Series probably hit a nerve.
On Saturday night, Tampa Bay’s Yandy Díaz came up with two outs in the top of the ninth, a runner on third and the Rays down by a run. He tried to check his swing on a 3-2 pitch, the plate umpire sent it to first base, and the first-base umpire ruled that Díaz had gone around, ending the game.
It brought back an all-too-familiar scene for Giants fans: Wilmer Flores in Game 5 of the 2021 NLDS against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Flores checked his swing, but first-base umpire Gabe Morales ruled that he had swung, and that call ended the series.
Naturally, the Díaz decision sparked a fresh round of debate about whether MLB should finally build in some kind of review or challenge system for check swings, much like ABS.
A video posted on social media by @tangotiger suggests that if the minor-league system currently being tested had been in place, Díaz would have been ruled ball. And because Flores’s check swing was even shorter than Díaz’s, his would have been a ball too under that system.
This is how ACS would look, had it been in place https://t.co/YmWnZlj7Kg pic.twitter.com/DwN5os6its
- Tangotiger 🍁 (@tangotiger) October 25, 2026
Still, the current version of that system has its own problems. As it’s being tested, a right-handed hitter would need to cross the plane of the first-base line, while a lefty would have to cross the plane of the third-base line, which means the batter almost has to go all the way around.
That doesn’t match the way a lot of people think about check swings. The old idea was that a hitter had to “break the plane of home plate,” but that’s fuzzy, and the rule book doesn’t give a clean definition of a swing. In practice, it often falls back on the umpire’s judgment, which is why one official sees a swing and another doesn’t.
The foul-line standard feels like too much. But the technology is clearly there to tell whether the bat crossed beyond the front of home plate, and that seems like the more sensible line for determining whether a swing happened.
Some traditionalists would hate adding another replay layer to baseball, but putting a real definition on one of the game’s murkiest calls would cut down on the kind of drama the Giants had to swallow with Flores.
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For a club that knows it needs help in the rotation and more depth in the bullpen, the arithmetic matters almost as much as the personnel decisions. Posey and the front office still have to thread the needle between those roster needs, existing contractual obligations and labor rules, and the real story of the winter may be less about who is available than what ownership is willing to authorize when the market starts to move. [Read more 🡒]