Rangers Star Wyatt Langford Believes New ABS Challenge System Will Help Him

The young Texas Rangers slugger is excited about how ABS will impact his future at-bats.

Nick Turchiaro-Imagn Images

The Texas Rangers have officially been eliminated from the playoffs in 2025. They came within striking distance in September, but after losing eight in a row, they couldn't hold onto their position. Now comes the offseason and working to get stars like Corey Seager and Marcus Semien healthy.

But when looking to the 2026 campaign, a huge change is coming to baseball. On Tuesday, it was announced that MLB would be implementing the automated balls and strikes (ABS) challenge system. What this means is that there will be a specific strike zone and a team gets two challenges to start the game.

Either the batter, hitter or catcher can initiate a challenge of the ball or strike call. If successful, they keep their challenge. If not, they lose it, much like the current replay system. This has the ability to affect everyone in either a negative or positive way. Certain pitchers get more strike calls out of the zone and certain hitters get a friendlier zone on their end.

One Rangers player who is excited about ABS coming to MLB is Wyatt Langford.

Wyatt Langford Believes He'll Benefit Greatly From the New System

Kevin Jairaj-Imagn Images

Langford, a top five pick in the 2023 draft, has had a breakout season in his sophomore campaign.
He leads Texas in home runs (25), is second in doubles (25), RBIs (62), OPS+ (126) and bWAR (5.4). He also has his first 20/20 season with 22 stolen bases. He is becoming the star many saw him as in the draft, and with the new challenge system, he could make an even bigger leap.

"I'm definitley excited. I personally feel like it's going to help me," Langford said to Evan Grant of The Dallas Morning News.

According to Grant, Langford has had 111 pitches that were outside of the strike zone called strikes. That's 14th in baseball and just ahead of Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees. This season, he's had 49 blown calls, the 25th-most in baseball.

** NEW UMPIRE AUDITOR RECORD **

Umpire Angel Hernandez rang up Wyatt Langford on three consecutive pitches out of the zone.

The strikeout pitch missed outside by 6.78 inches.

This was the largest miss on a called strikeout in Umpire Auditor history. pic.twitter.com/BWmizkDsmD

— Umpire Auditor (@UmpireAuditor) April 13, 2024

This will especially change early counts for Langford. In his career in an 0-1 count, the 23-year-old is hitting .215 with a .631 OPS and 36 walks to 186 strikeouts. Flip that to after a 1-0 count, and all of those numbers shoot up. He's hitting .270 with an .885 OPS and 89 walks to 79 strikeouts.

"The 1-1 pitch might be the most important in baseball. If it's not, the first pitch is. This should be a huge benefit for Wyatt," manager Bruce Bochy said.

With Langford having the ability to challenge those close calls early in the count, he can significantly change his fortunes and take another step forward as a hitter. It'll be seen next year in spring training and early in the season how much Langford uses the challenges compared to the rest of the team given there's only two to work with, but since Bochy believes it could help the young slugger, he might get his fair share.

Not everyone likes the rules change, though. Josh Jung, the team's player rep, says that even though hitters were for the new challenge system, pitchers weren't. Regardless, Langford could be one of the players who benefits the most from this, and he could have an even bigger breakout in 2026.