ARLINGTON — Rangers manager Skip Schumaker has maintained that, as it pertains to the automatic balls and strikes challenge system, his team will continue to learn how it works best as the rest of baseball does.
Consider Wednesday night another lesson.
Center fielder Evan Carter became the first Rangers player to have their challenge request denied in the seventh inning of Wednesday’s 8-4 loss. Carter, who’d successfully challenged a called strike one from home plate umpire Shane Livensparger earlier in the same at-bat, worked a full count vs. Pirates right-handed pitcher Braxton Ashcroft. He took what he believed was ball four on a sinker well outside the zone, and as he exited the batter’s box and turned toward first base, Livensparger called strike three.
The 23-year-old turned back and tapped the top of his helmet to trigger a challenge. Livensparger shook his head, because as Carter relayed postgame, “I left the batter’s box, looked away and I couldn’t come back and challenge.”
“I think Evan saw it being a ball, was walking toward first base, maybe surprised it was called for a strike because he knew it was a ball, and was maybe a little too late after kind of looking toward our direction ” Schumaker said. “I kind of honestly understand both sides of it.”
League rules state that a player has “roughly’ two seconds to challenge a pitch and that batters cannot look toward their own dugout before they do so in an effort to curb assistance from coaches or teammates. Livensparger viewed Carter’s movement as a look toward the Rangers dugout. Carter called it “muscle memory” in the way that he turned and reacted to ball four.
“I think it’s just really up to the umpire’s discretion in the moment,” Carter said. “At the end of the day, I don’t make the rules, and I don’t enforce them either. On another day, maybe he says sure, maybe another guy says sure, I don’t know, but in the moment he said, ‘You can’t do that.’”