World Series champion John Smoltz warns baseball 'will suffer' if ABS system is applied to all pitches
John Smoltz expressed concerns about the potential full-time implementation of the Automatic Ball-Strike (ABS) system in baseball. While he acknowledges the current challenge system as a success, he believes that automating all pitches would negatively impact the game. Smoltz noted changes in player behavior, such as decreased swing rates and increased walks, as byproducts of the system.
- ▪John Smoltz warns that baseball will suffer if the ABS system is applied to all pitches.
- ▪He supports the current challenge system, which allows teams two challenges per game.
- ▪Smoltz observed a decrease in swing rates and an increase in walk rates among hitters this season.
Fox News — Latest files mainly under news. We currently carry 3,549 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Fox News |
| Canonical URL | https://www.foxnews.com/sports/world-series-champion-john-smoltz-warns-baseball-suffer-abs-system-applied-pitches |
| Publication time | Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:54:55 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-07T12:04:33.580Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-07T12:04:33.580Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | BZUTijUnLjSj |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
MLB World Series champion John Smoltz warns baseball 'will suffer' if ABS system is applied to all pitches Smoltz says the ABS system has been a 'big success,' and doesn't want it to change By Ryan Canfield Fox News Published June 7, 2026 7:54am EDT Facebook Twitter Threads Flipboard Comments Print Email Add Fox News on Google close Video MLB’s Automatic Ball-Strike System is Having a Big Impact A month into the MLB season, batters are making frequent use of the new ABS challenge system. NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! World Series champion John Smoltz said he likes the ABS challenge system but hopes that the system never becomes full-time, where all pitches are automated.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fox News.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Fox News
