It’s officially known as the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System, and it’s being used for the first time in regular season games at the major league level this year.

Everyone has an opinion about it - you either like it because you’re sick of umpires calling balls that are strikes or strikes that are balls and they’ve finally done something about that. Or you dislike it because they’re taking the human element out of the game.

Less than a week into this whole thing, I’ve firmly decided that I’m on the fence, which is a lame take for a columnist to have. But while I’m in this wait-and-see mode, I admit to leaning toward going back to the old way of doing it for one simple reason:

Adding ball-and-strike challenges to already having challenges available for close plays on the field essentially eliminates heated arguments from managers who make fools of themselves while we sit back and enjoy the spectacle of grown men acting like little kids with their temper tantrums.

Imagine if all of these challenges had been around when Lou Piniella managed the Mariners. We’d be deprived of those wonderful times when he lost his bleep and threw first base into the outfield or kicked dirt on home plate after being ejected.

I’ve always thought that bad calls even out. If the umpire makes a terrible third-strike call on Cal Raleigh in the second inning, he might make another awful third-strike call on Aaron Judge later in the game.

I’m probably in the minority with this tepid take, but I sympathize with the umpires. Picture yourself behind the catcher in a major-league game. The pitcher is throwing 95 mph fastballs, some of which go straight, others of which have movement. Then what about those secondary pitches that curve and sweep and drop? Good luck with instantaneously getting every call right.

Meanwhile, we sit at home looking at that little strike zone square that’s sponsored by some casino somewhere and wonder how the umpire could have missed that ball that was clearly outside that little rectangle.

And now we have the technology that tells us, yeah, we were right and the ump was wrong. Over and over again.

If you don’t know exactly what the ABS rules are, no worries, I didn’t either until I Googled them this morning. Each team gets two challenges a game and retains a challenge when it’s right but lose it when it’s wrong.

So you’d think you need to be strategic about it to have a challenge in your back pocket for a crucial situation in the ninth inning. But no, some of these players are already serial challengers. Case in point - Yankees shortstop Jose Caballero, who was the first player ever to make a challenge in San Francisco last week.

Monday night at T-Mobile Park, he challenged two pitches in his first at-bat and was successful with both, turning a strikeout into a walk.

We’re used to seeing different mannerisms from baseball players such as adjusting their hitting gloves or scratching their crotch. But add two more to the list. We have managers cupping their ears when they want to challenge a call on the field, and now we’ve got guys tapping their helmets and caps to signal their ball-strike challenge.

I’m already tired of those two-tappers and find myself hoping the umpire was right.

Monday night was a rough one for home plate umpire Mike Estabrook. The Yankees went 5-for-5 on their ABS challenges. Estabrook kept calling strikes on pitches that were low, and I got a kick out of it when they showed Yankees manager Aaron Boone barking at him for blowing those calls.

If I had been Estabrook, every time the count was 1-and-1 on a batter, I wouldn’t signal that with my index fingers, I’d raise my two middle fingers in the air as high as I could, just to tell you how I felt about this stupid ABS system. And I’d go one step farther and turn toward Boone when I did it.

Back in the day, someone at the MLB office in New York tracked how good and bad the umpires were behind the scenes. Now we have an umpire scoreboard for all to see on ESPN. Poor Chad Whitson, he’s the biggest loser so far - seven challenges have been made on his balls and strikes and all seven were overturned.

We’ve got team ABS standings too, and they show that the Mariners have been successful with 33 percent of their challenges through five games, ranking 25th in MLB. We also see that the Athletics have made a whopping 53 challenges while the White Sox, no doubt feeling they’re not going anywhere this season anyway, have not made a single challenge.

By now you’ve seen the animated view of a challenged pitch. If any part of that ball touches the edge of that little square, it’s a strike. If I’m a batter, that seems borderline unfair. You could reasonably argue that more than a seam on the ball should be in the strike zone for it to be a strike.

In Monday night’s game, one of the Yankees challenged a low strike call by Estabrook, and he was successful because the ball was one-tenth of an inch below the zone. One-tenth of an inch is the thickness of a quarter.

If I’m MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, I’m hereby giving the umpire the benefit of the doubt by declaring one-tenth of an inch to be close enough and if guys like Estabrook are consistently calling that a strike, then it’s a strike, dammit!

Remember what I said previously about being on the fence? In the span of 20 paragraphs, I’ve talked myself into hating the ABS system as much as the NFL’s supposedly dynamic kickoffs, both of which are dumb as hell.

Jim Moore has covered Washington’s sports scene from every angle for multiple news outlets. He appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10 a.m. on Jason Puckett’s podcast at PuckSports.com. He writes a Substack blog at jimmoorethego2guy.substack.com. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter) @cougsgo.