Pete Alonso controversy is a glaring mistake MLB should never let happen again

At this point, ball-tracking technology has advanced to the point where the NFL no longer relies on chains to measure first downs. Tennis has done away with line judges entirely. Even baseball, the stodgiest of all the major American sports, now uses roboumps to adjudicate strike zone challenges.

And yet, when it comes to determining whether a crucial, potentially go-ahead homer was fair or foul in a game between division rivals in the heat of the postseason chase, the best that a multibillion-dollar sports league can offer is one man staring down the line from hundreds of feet away.

With the score tied at three in the bottom of the seventh inning against the New York Yankees on Wednesday night, Pete Alonso hit what sure seemed to be a solo homer to give the Baltimore Orioles a late lead in a game they needed to win as they try to keep their AL Wild Card hopes alive. But the umpiring crew ruled it a foul ball, to the disbelief of Baltimore’s dugout.

O’s manager Craig Albernaz challenged the ruling, but while most of the publicly available replays seemed to show that the ball had passed the top of the foul pole still in fair territory, MLB’s replay center in New York had the call stand, ruling that they didn’t have anything obvious enough to overturn the call. Alonso went on to strike out three pitchers later, and New York pushed two runs across in the top of the eighth to escape with a highly controversial 5-3 win.

It’s worth noting that, while enraged Orioles fans took plenty of screenshots of incriminating camera angles, most of those were taken from a camera down the first-base line. The angle that came closest to looking right down the third-base line made it seem much closer, at least ambiguous enough that you can understand why the replay review team decided to stick with the call on the field.

But why are we having this debate at all? Why, in the year 2026, are we forced to defer to a call made from a great distance in real speed due to a lack of more definitive information?

Pete Alonso foul ball controversy should spur serious change in MLB’s replay system

That was the question that Alonso and the Orioles were asking after the game.

“There’s ball-tracking data,” Albernaz said, via Jacob Calvin Meyer of the Baltimore Sun. “It’s 2026. I think technology has advanced pretty good. There were teams using AI on the iPads, and other sports use ball-tracking data for challengeable calls. I don’t understand why we don’t do it.”

O’s starter — and MLBPA rep — Chris Bassitt had a simple answer that question: “Because it’ll cost money. That’s it. That’s literally it.”

It’s hard to disagree, given all the advancements we’ve seen across other sports when it comes to tracking the ball in real time. Heck, MLB feels confident enough in its ability to map the strike zone and track individual pitches to let players challenge ball-strike calls. Doing the same in a ballpark with irregular dimensions would certainly up the difficulty a bit, but is it really a problem we’re incapable of solving in this day and age?

It beggars belief that MLB couldn’t create a Hawk-eye sort of system in all 30 parks that would remove any potential for controversy once and for all. You can’t really blame any of the umpires involved here: The third-base umpire is trying to track a small white dot traveling away from him at great speed while drawing an imaginary line up from the top of the foul pole, and the replay review team is specifically told not to overrule the original call unless they have a clear and obvious reason to do so. The system operated as intended, and still likely got an important decision wrong.

This is going to keep on happening until MLB removes the human element entirely. The decision not to do so is a choice; tere’s no way we don’t have the technology, and the league certainly has the money.

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