Umpire Laz Diaz Goes Petty on Royals Catcher After ABS System Overturns Two Straight Calls
Laz Diaz had two of his calls overturned by the ABS challenge system in a row. Then he decided to remind everyone that the umpires still control the strike zone. Sort of.
Diaz was behind the plate at Kauffman Stadium for Monday’s game between the Boston Red Sox and Kansas City Royals. Boston catcher Connor Wong stepped into the box in the fifth inning to face Kansas City starter Seth Lugo. Lugo threw a pitch. Diaz called it a ball. Royals catcher Salvador Perez tapped his helmet to challenge. The ABS system overturned the call to a strike.
Next pitch. Same thing. Slightly high. Diaz called it a ball. Perez tapped his helmet. ABS overturned it again. Two pitches in a row, two challenges, two calls flipped.
You can probably feel where this is going. The third pitch came in way high. We are talking obviously, indisputably out of the zone high. Diaz called it a ball. Then, with the kind of small theater that only a veteran umpire can produce, he made a show of letting Perez know that one definitely was a ball and there was no need to challenge.
It was petty. It was also kind of funny. The ABS challenge system is new this year, and umpires across baseball are still figuring out how to live with it. The system allows each team three challenges per game on ball-strike calls, with overturned calls not counting against the limit. Umpires used to have absolute authority over the strike zone. Now they have a robot looking over their shoulder.
Diaz, for the record, has been one of the more challenged umpires in baseball this season. He is on the wrong end of the data, and his strike zone has been called inconsistent for years. The fact that two of his calls in a single at-bat got overturned is not a fluke. It is a pattern.
The bigger question is how baseball is going to handle the cultural side of ABS. The pitch-by-pitch enforcement of the rulebook strike zone is more accurate than humans can be. Nobody seriously argues otherwise. But part of the appeal of baseball has always been the human element of umpiring. Players negotiated with umpires. Umpires had reputations. Hitters worked the edges of a zone they thought they could read.
That texture is going away. Umpires know it. Players know it. Fans are split on it.
The petty move from Diaz is the kind of small protest that you are going to see more of as the season goes on. Umpires cannot directly fight the technology, but they can make their feelings known. They can be slow to set up. They can call a pitch in a way that emphasizes how much they think the system is wrong. They can play to the catcher and make a show of how obvious a call is when it actually goes their way.
None of that is going to change the trend line. The ABS challenge system is here for the rest of 2026, and the data so far suggests it is making the game more accurate. Whether that improves the watching experience is a different question.
For now, Laz Diaz is the early face of the cranky-umpire-vs-the-robot subplot. He probably will not be the last one. There is a reason MLB tested this in the minors for years before bringing it up. The veteran umps were never going to love it.
Perez handled the whole thing well, by the way. He kept tapping his helmet when he thought Diaz missed a pitch, and the system kept proving him right. That is what good catchers do. They get their pitchers strikes any way they can.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
