I have been watching bad umpires get away with murder for my entire life as a sports fan and I have never once seen any of them face a real consequence. That changed three days into the 2026 MLB season. ABS umpire accountability is not a theory anymore. CB Bucknor went behind the plate for the Reds-Red Sox game on Saturday and got six of his calls publicly overturned in front of 38,000 people, with the stadium scoreboard keeping a running count of how badly he was getting embarrassed. Thirty years in the league and the first time a computer gets to check his work in a real game, Bucknor went 2 for 8.
I loved every second of it.
CB Bucknor Got Exactly What He Had Coming
In the sixth inning, Bucknor tried to punch out Eugenio Suarez on back-to-back pitches with the bases loaded. Both of them were challenged. Both of them got overturned. Bucknor called two consecutive strikes that were not strikes, with authority, against a guy standing in with the bases full, and the camera told him he was wrong twice in a row while the whole park went insane. Suarez still grounded out on the next pitch, which is annoying, but the moment mattered. Bucknor thought he had the game in his hands and ABS umpire accountability snatched it right back.
The Red Sox burned through their challenges by the fourth inning because Bucknor kept missing calls and they kept using their challenges trying to fix it. That left them with nothing in the eighth when Bucknor rung up Trevor Story on a check swing that Story clearly did not complete, with the tying run on base. Bucknor did not even bother to look at the first base umpire for help. Story went ballistic. Alex Cora stepped in and got ejected. After the game, Cora said “he has one job to do, it wasn’t his best day.” That is about as close as a big league manager is going to get to saying an umpire is a disaster in a postgame interview.
The Old Guard Has to Adapt or Get Out
Bucknor has been calling games in the big leagues since the 1990s. He has been doing it under a union structure that has made it nearly impossible to hold a veteran umpire accountable no matter how bad the calls get. Angel Hernandez just retired after the league finally found a mechanism to move him out. That era is over. ABS umpire accountability does not care how long you have been in the league. It does not care that you have seniority. It posts your error rate on the scoreboard in real time and every person in the building gets to watch it happen.
Some of these older umps are going to look at that situation and walk away. I am completely fine with that. You had thirty years to get the calls right and the only thing protecting you was the fact that nobody could prove in the moment how wrong you were. Now they can. Adapt or retire. Those are the options.
Judgment Calls Without Accountability Are Rigging Games
Here is what drives me crazy about bad umpiring that does not get said enough. It is not just that the calls are wrong. It is that they are inconsistently wrong. One umpire likes a certain pitcher and gives him four inches off the plate. Another umpire has a problem with a guy and squeezes him to death all game. That is not human error. That is one man’s personal preferences deciding outcomes in games that thousands of people paid to watch and millions of people have money riding on. If the inconsistency is random, I can live with it. When it is pattern behavior from a guy with a thirty-year history of bad calls, that is a different problem.
Full robot ball and strike calling is where this ends up and it should. The ABS challenge system is a compromise. Two challenges per game, you lose them if the challenge fails, which means the Red Sox had no recourse after the fourth inning when Bucknor kept making mistakes. That is the current limit of ABS umpire accountability and it is a real one. But the compromise is working well enough in year one that the full version becomes easier to justify every single week.
This Is Just the Beginning
The league went 35 for 60 on ABS challenges in the first couple days of the season. That means almost 60 percent of the time someone challenged a call, they were right and the umpire was wrong. That is not the system catching close calls. That is the system catching real mistakes at a rate that should make everyone uncomfortable with how long we just accepted this. ABS umpire accountability is doing exactly what it needs to do right now. The Reds won 6-5 in 11 innings Saturday and the system helped protect that result.
CB Bucknor got publicly documented as one of the worst umpires in baseball on day three of the season. There is no hiding from it. The scorecard is public. Give me full robot umpires and get these guys off the field completely, because if this week proved anything, it is that the computer is a lot better at this than the 63-year-old man who has been collecting a paycheck since 1996 without anyone being able to hold him accountable. That ends now.
