The 2026 season isn't even a full week old yet. The ABS challenge system has taken the league by storm, and by all accounts, has worked exactly as designed. Pitches are getting tracked. Bad calls are getting overturned. Fans in stadiums are roaring when the verdict flashes on the videoboard.

The people who very clearly don't love it, are the umpires. The loudest cheers come when their calls are getting overturned.

And the first umpire to be fully exposed by the system was CB Bucknor.

In his first game behind the plate this season — a Reds-Red Sox matchup — Bucknor didn't just have a rough day. He had a historically rough day. Eight challenges in a single game. Six of them overturned. An 88% accuracy rate, well below his already-below-average career numbers. And the calls that didn't get challenged? Some of those might've been worse. Jomboy's breakdown put the total number of missed calls in that game at 20. Twenty. That's not a rough patch behind the dish — that's a full-on meltdown.

Then, three days later, Bucknor showed up at first base for a Rays-Brewers game in Milwaukee and made one of the most egregiously bad calls the league has seen in quite some time. He called a runner out for supposedly not touching the bag. Replay showed Jake Bauers' foot hit the middle of the base. Not the edge. The middle. And the broadcast clearly caught Bucknor not even looking at the base when the play happened — he was watching the errant throw. Both managers were shown on camera laughing about it from their dugouts.

That's where we are with this. Both teams openly laughing. Not even angry — just a call so bad they found it amusing.

This is not sustainable. And it's time for the MLB to actually do something about it.

Twenty Missed Calls. In One Game.

Let's just sit with that number for a second. Twenty missed calls in a single game. Not a week. Not a homestand. One eleven-inning game.

The six overturned ABS challenges were just the surface. It was a consistent issue for both sides throughout the game, and it always seemed to be with pitches at the bottom of the zone. Then there was the check swing call that set off the most chaotic sequence of the day.

In the top of the seventh, with Boston trailing and no challenges remaining, Bucknor rung up shortstop Trevor Story on what looked like a checked swing. He didn't bother appealing to the first base umpire — the standard move for literally every umpire ever in that situation. He just called it a swing, Story had to be physically restrained, and when Red Sox manager Alex Cora came out to argue, Bucknor ejected him.

To be clear: Bucknor had already had all six overturned calls by that point. The whole stadium knew it. The broadcast knew it. Cora knew it. And then Bucknor — instead of doing the one thing that would have defused the situation — doubled down out of pure stubbornness and tossed the manager.

Cora, to his credit, handled the postgame with more grace than Bucknor probably deserved:

“He has one job to do, it’s call balls and strikes. It wasn’t his best day. That’s what the system does. It’s out there. Everybody sees it, and he’ll be the first one to accept it. I saw him putting his head down after one of the challenges. We’re all human. It’s not easy, what we do and what he does.”

The Eugenio Suarez Sequence Is a Perfect Microcosm

The single most memorable moment of that game — and arguably the clearest window into what Bucknor's strike zone actually looked like on Saturday — came in the sixth inning with Reds slugger Eugenio Suarez at the plate on a 1-2 count.

Bucknor called strike three. Suarez tapped his helmet to challenge. Overturned.

On the very next pitch, Bucknor called strike three again. Suarez tapped his helmet again. Overturned again.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the very next inning, it happened again. Not on consecutive pitches this time, but both of them low, both of them in the same at-bat, and both of them overturned. 

The Reds TV booth actually saw this coming. Before the game, broadcaster Sam LeCure joked that with Bucknor behind the dish, they might set a record for challenges. His broadcast partner, Jim Day, went silent. LeCure wasn't wrong. By the end of eight innings, the Reds had gone five-for-five on their challenges.

The whole point of ABS is to give teams a backstop when the rare missed calls happen. Two challenges per team is designed to handle the occasional mistake. It was never designed to handle a performance as bad as this one.

Turns Out, Moving Him Off the Plate Didn’t Fix Anything

If Saturday was a disaster behind the plate, Tuesday was something else entirely. Because this wasn't about a gray area in the strike zone or the difficulty of calling ball versus strike when it's separated by a fraction of an inch. This was Bucknor working first base, where the job gets much simpler: watch your base.

Bauers touched first base. He stepped on the direct center of it, for crying out loud. There was no real ambiguity here. The Brewers challenged immediately, the replay took about four seconds to confirm what anyone watching already knew, and the call was overturned.

But the worst part — the detail that makes this something more than a bad call — is the broadcast footage of Bucknor when the play happened. He wasn't watching the base. He was watching the errant throw from second baseman Ben Williamson. He made a ruling on whether a runner touched the bag without looking at the bag.

That's not a judgment error. A judgment error is when you're looking at a bang-bang play and your eyes tell you something slightly different from what happened. That's human, and it's going to happen to everybody. What Bucknor did Tuesday was completely make up a call just to insert himself into the game. He literally couldn't have seen whether Bauers touched it or not, because he wasn't looking.

It only got worse after the call was overturned. The broadcast cut to both dugouts, where even the managers were laughing in disbelief.

This Isn't a New Problem. The ABS System Just Made It More Visible.

None of this is coming out of thin air. CB Bucknor has been one of the most widely criticized umpires in baseball for decades. In 2003 and 2006, Sports Illustrated surveys of active players voted him the worst umpire in MLB. A 2010 ESPN survey of 100 active players named him the worst umpire in the game.

According to, this isn’t just a rough stretch — it’s been the story for years. Over the last decade, roughly 87% of MLB umpires have graded better than Bucknor in consistency, and 96% have graded better in correct calls above expected. And it hasn't gotten any better as of late — dead last in consistency and bottom-three in correct calls above expected last season. At a certain point, it stops being “he had a bad year” and just becomes what he is.

The difference now is that for the first time, he's getting called out on national television. For years, Bucknor's bad calls disappeared into the game log. Hitters walked away frustrated, managers got ejected, and the next day, everyone moved on because there was nothing anybody could do about it. The ABS system changed that. Now when Bucknor misses a call, there's a whole graphic on the videoboard that shows everyone just how wrong he was.

The ABS wasn't designed to expose umpires. It was designed to provide a last line of defense against the occasional missed call. But what it's incidentally done is create a public scoreboard that makes such blatant inaccuracy impossible to ignore. For most umpires, two challenges a game is more than enough. For Bucknor, I'm not sure doubling it would suffice.

The League Needs to Do Something About This

The most sensible option is also the one that gets floated every few years and never happens: send him to the minors for a while. This isn't unprecedented. Umpires work their way up through the minor league system before reaching MLB. The structure exists for them to go back down when they aren't performing well — not as humiliation, it's the same thing that happens to players. A pitcher with a 7.00 ERA doesn't keep taking the ball every fifth day. A hitter who can't make contact gets sent down to find his swing. This is professional sports; there are supposed to be performance-based decisions.

A stint in Triple-A isn't a career-ending thing. It's not even a particularly drastic one.

The alternative — doing nothing, continuing to rotate Bucknor through MLB games, and letting the ABS system rack up that public scoreboard until the season ends — just sends the wrong type of message to both the players and the fans.

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