MLB's first month with robot umpires gave us a 7.3% jump in walks, a five-minute increase in average game time, and a series of headlines asking you to have an opinion. Most of the leaders I respect would shrug.
That isn't apathy. It's a skill, and it's harder than it looks.
When a workplace metric jumps 7.3% in a month, the reflex is to do something. Praise. Punish. Call a meeting. Most journalists write the story the same way, with the implication that something has changed, that it matters, and that you should care. Restraint feels passive. Sometimes it feels lazy.
But the people I've watched do this well treat restraint as the move, not the absence of one.
They look at the chart, decide whether anything has actually meaningfully changed, and act accordingly. Most of the time, the answer is “don't try to explain it.” Once in a while it's “yes it changed, and let's figure out why.” Knowing the difference is most of the job.
The Associated Press story this month, on MLB's first full month with the Automated Ball/Strike System, is a good place to practice the skill.
Walks up, games longer through MLB's first month with robo umps
“Up 7.3%” Is Designed to Be Felt
The AP's headline summary, paraphrased:
Walks are up 7.3%. Average game time has crept up by five minutes. Attendance is up 2.8%. Batting average is up one point to .243. Home runs are at the same rate as last year. Stolen bases and the success rate “dipped.”
Notice the precision when the change feels dramatic and the vagueness when it doesn't. Walks got a percentage. Stolen bases got a verb. Stolen bases per game actually fell from 1.6 to 1.4, a 12.5% drop, which is a bigger percentage than the walks number. The reporter could have said that and didn't.
This isn't deception. It's just how comparison reporting works. The framing tells you what to feel, and you don't notice the choice was made.
Every headline (in the news or on a PowerPoint slide) like this has a small cost. It takes your attention, costs you a mental cycle, asks you to form a view. Multiply by every news cycle (or Weekly Operating Review) and you're paying a real tax in cognitive effort–and time wasted looking for an explanation that isn't there. Most of the time, what passes for news is just variation.
Related Post: Stop Comparing MLB Stats Year to Year: A Better Way to See Real Trends
A Chart Isn't More Rigor. It's Less Anxiety.
The part that took me too long to articulate, even after writing Measures of Success, is this. Most people don't pick up Process Behavior Charts because they want to be more analytical. They pick them up because they're tired of reacting to numbers that don't mean anything.
A PBC's most useful job is to give you permission to ignore noise in a system and a metric.
Here's a Process Behavior Chart of MLB walks per team per game going back to 2009. The green line is the average. The red lines are the upper and lower natural process limits, calculated from the variation in the historical data itself. The 2026 point sits at 3.61, above the upper limit. Data if through May 7.
By the rules of a PBC, that's a signal. Something has changed in the underlying system. It might very well be the impact of the ABS system. That's as plausible of a hypothesis as anything I could think of.
On this chart, 2026 is the only data point where the signal is worth your attention. The other 17 are noise. The chart tells you exactly which is which. Almost every year, your instinct should have been to shrug.
Same Number, Different Story
What looks like a signal in one frame can look like noise in another.
Zoom out to 1927 and the upper limit becomes 3.637 — a hair above the 2026 point. By this chart, the 2026 rate is high, but technically inside the limits. You'd shrug. There's lots of signals and shifts over time. Why? I'd have to ask a baseball historian. But the chart above shows that “walks in baseball” was not a single stable and predictable system over that timeframe.
The trouble is, the hundred-year chart treats MLB as a single system, which it has never been. Strike zones have been redefined. The mound was lowered in 1969 after the “Year of the Pitcher.” Teams have been added. The DH arrived in 1973 and reached the National League in 2022. When the underlying system changes, the limits should change with it. Otherwise the chart is measuring an MLB that doesn't exist anymore.
Recalculated for each era, 2026 sits above the recent era's upper limit. The shrug becomes a raised eyebrow.
Three charts of the same number. The answer to “should I care about this?” is different in each one. That's the method's gift to you. It tells you, for any given number, what's worth your attention.
The Signal That Pays Off the Restraint
When a real signal does show up, the question to ask is “what changed in the system?”
The 2026 baseball season has a candidate, and it isn't subtle. Again, the ABS challenge system rewrote the strike zone. Pitches in the strike zone fell from 50.6% of all offerings in April 2025 to 47.3% in April 2026. That's the second-lowest figure since Statcast started tracking, ahead only of April 2010. I apologize for not drawing a PBC of that data.
A precisely defined zone the catcher can no longer expand by framing pitches. Pitchers throwing fewer pitches in it. More balls called. More walks.
The system has changed, the chart confirms it, and the cause seems pretty easily identifiable. That is what a real signal looks like.
This is what restraint earns you. By not reacting to every headline, you save your energy for the moments when something has actually shifted. By the time those moments arrive, you have the context to know what to do.
What This Doesn't Tell Us Yet
There's a buried clue in the AP article. Walks averaged about 7.30 per game (combined, both teams) through the first three weeks of April, then dropped to 6.98 from April 21 through April 30.
Two date ranges isn't a chart. But it suggests pitchers may already be adapting. Or that's just another example of noise in the system.
The interesting question isn't “are walks up?” It's “for how long?” If pitchers learn the new zone fast enough, by August the chart may look closer to last year's. If they don't, 2026 may be the start of a new average altogether.
Either way, the move is to wait for the chart. Most of the people I've coached on this come around eventually. The ones who don't are usually the ones running too fast to look at one.
I'll try to come back and update the data at the end of the season.
Note: I created these charts using the PBC Analyzer Pro tool by Chris Chapman. Learn more via his Substack.
