FANATICS FEST – NYC – Jason Kendall spent 15 years behind the plate — a three-time All-Star and the hard-nosed heart of those scrappy, bottom-payroll Pirates teams of the late ’90s, a catcher who hit leadoff, stole bases, and wore 254 pitches over a career. He is not the guy you’d expect to embrace automated ball-strike calls.
He does anyway.
Caught up with at Fanatics Fest — his first time at the event — Kendall didn’t hedge on where the game is headed. “There are certain things I didn’t think I would’ve liked back then, but now I fell in love with ’em,” he said. “Everything Manfred’s doing is unbelievable.”
The robot umps don’t rattle him, and he doesn’t think they should rattle anyone behind the plate. To Kendall, ABS just confirms what catchers already do for a living.
“Every catcher back there knows what the strike zone is,” he said. “That’s all we do — catch in spring training, catch bullpens.”
That’s the tell from a lifer: the strike zone was never a mystery to the men crouched in it. The technology is new. Knowing the zone cold is not.
For a catcher who built a reputation on grit and instinct, the endorsement lands differently than it would from a younger player who never worked a game without replay. Kendall played through the sport’s last analog era and came out the other side a believer.
