Twins’ Ryan Jeffers shows ABS prowess: ‘I’d be shocked if there’s anybody better’

Ryan Jeffers caught Cody Laweryson’s 1-2 fastball near the top edge of the zone, heard the call from home plate umpire Steve Jaschinski and started tapping his helmet.

It was a particularly important time in the game with the Twins protecting a two-run lead and the Tigers threatening with a pair of runners on base in the eighth inning on Wednesday.

A quick review with the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System revealed the catcher’s instincts were correct. He got up from his crouch, twirled around and pumped his fist. It was his league-leading eighth pitch that he overturned from a ball into a strikeout, and it came a day after doing it twice in consecutive innings.

It’s still early and the sample size is far too small to draw too many meaningful conclusions about how to best utilize the ABS system, but one thing is clear: Jeffers seems to be particularly good at it.

“You either have it or you don’t,” Jeffers said. “Some people have an innate ability to understand the strike zone, and I guess I’m pretty good at it.”

Jeffers entered Thursday having won 10 of his 15 challenges behind the plate. Those 10 were tied for the league-lead with Angels catcher Logan O’Hoppe. Jeffers has won 67 percent of his challenges, and most of them have been overturns into strikeouts.

Most of the ones he hasn’t gotten overturned, he said, were pitches he wouldn’t be challenging if it was a different situation on the game. He may, for example, send one off that he’s not super confident in, taking a shot late in a close game hoping to flip a count.

But most of the time, he’s been getting his calls right.

“I’d be shocked if there’s anybody better at it,” manager Derek Shelton said. “He’s really good at it and he’s really aware of it. … We were talking about the leverage of the situation. I think he does a really good job of reading that or where we’re at.”

Shelton praised Jeffers on Wednesday night for not signaling for a challenge in the eighth inning on a pitch that he struck out on that was borderline. The Twins, at that point, had just one challenge remaining in a close game.

“You could tell he wanted to challenge it, but he was smart enough to realize ‘I might need that in the ninth in a two-run game,’” Shelton said. “I think that speaks a lot of who he is as a person to realize where he’s at.”

While Jeffers has had plenty of success behind the plate — and so has Victor Caratini, who entered the day 4 of 5 on his challenges — Twins hitters have been less successful with their challenges at the plate.

Across the league, fielders (pitchers and catchers, but primarily catchers) had overturned 60% of pitches they’ve challenged entering Thursday, while batters were only at 48%.

Twins hitters have been particularly aggressive with it: entering Thursday, they had challenged a league-leading 22 pitches and had won 50 percent of them. That’s resulted in them running out of their challenges early in a couple games. Even so, Shelton said they “openly trust,” their hitters and they want to get a bigger sample size before they make any changes in how they utilize the new system.

“I think we’re going to have to be a month in before we do any evaluation of it,” he said.

But if it means risking losing challenges that their catchers can’t use later on, perhaps that stance will change as the season goes on, especially if Jeffers keeps up at this pace.

“It’s kind of almost automatic at this point,” starter Bailey Ober said. “Whenever we see him challenging, we’re like ‘Alright, we’ve got a strike there.’ Yeah, it’s always a good sign whenever I see him tapping his head.”

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