The final stretch of the Major League Baseball season is upon us, and the race for division titles and better seeding within the postseason is as important as ever. For the Yankees, the goal is not just to catch the Tampa Bay Rays, who sit six games above them in first place, but also to fend off the Boston Red Sox, who have surged back into the American League East race. The Yankees’ archrivals are two games back for second place in the AL East, and every game from now until the final day of the regular season matters for potential postseason positioning.
With how important every game is, it also stands that every pitch is extremely important. MLB’s Automated Balls and Strikes system has allowed the players to take some power into their own hands and challenge pitches they believe were called wrong. A batter, catcher, or in a rare case, the pitcher, can challenge, and it has been somewhat of a revelation and, in some instances, a game-saving measure for teams. So with the end of the regular season fast approaching and divisional races tightening up, who should the Yankees constrict on challenges, and who should they trust when their hand taps the top of their helmet?
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Top Three:
Before starting an analysis of these three, it’s worth mentioning that Aaron Judge isn’t actually number one in the top three. In fact, he’s second. In first place is Max Schuemann, who last played for the Yankees on August 1st against the Chicago White Sox before being sent to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre outright just two days later. He has a Net Overturns For (a metric that measures how many more or fewer umpire calls a player or team successfully gets overturned compared to what an average player would expect when facing identical pitch locations/game situations) of 4.8 and won seven of the nine challenges he put into play for the 40 games he was up with the big club. However, seeing as he’s not with the major league club currently, it was worth a mention, but the focus is on those who play every day.
It’s not a surprise to see Aaron Judge at the top of this list. He’s the best player on the Yankees, he’s one of the best players in MLB, and even though he’s been hurt for a while, he is confident that he can return to the lineup and make a sizeable impact. And, as Yankees fans have seen since Judge’s meteoric rise, the guy knows his strike zone. With his stature, he almost has no other choice. Out of the eight challenges he used when at the plate, he won six of them, and all of the challenges came at the bottom part of the zone.
Aaron Judge’s 2026 ABS challenges | Baseball Savant
When Judge taps his helmet, an occurrence that doesn’t happen very often, even though he gets questionable calls in other areas than the bottom of the strike zone, it’s worth paying attention to. He commands the batter’s box, and he knows his strike zone better than anyone.
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Caballero won’t be in the lineup as consistently anymore with the coming of 21-year-old George Lombard Jr., but in the at-bats that he will get, he loves to challenge. Fortunately, he’s good at it too. His 24 challenges are a team high, and at a 58 percent win rate, he’s doing about as much as he can in the box. Sixty-seven percent of Caballero’s pitch challenges are considered reasonable according to Baseball Savant, so while he doesn’t always get it right, most of them are within the margin of error to understand why he may think a ball is a strike or vice versa.
A name that many might not expect to be on here is Ryan McMahon. He’s not an above-average hitter (and never has been). His 82 OPS+ this season could be the lowest of his career in a year when he plays more than 100 games, but that hasn’t stopped him from challenging the strike zone when necessary. He has quietly had the highest success rate of anyone on the Yankees with five or more challenges. However, the caveat is that, while he’s successful, he doesn’t challenge often. Five is not a high number relatively speaking. He sits tied for 11th in challenge attempts, and of the seven players lower than him, three of them have only one challenge and two have two. So, for Yankees fans it might be worth remembering that McMahon doesn’t use the challenge system often, but when he does, he’s usually correct.
Bottom Three:
The feeling has been consistent regarding Chisholm’s work at the plate this season. He came into the year talking about a goal of reaching the 50-50 mark, and to this point, he only has 17 home runs, a slash line of .216/.295/.396, and an OPS+ of 92. His work in the field has been strong, at the very least. His 10 OAA at second base is the 10th best among all major league players and third amongst second basemen (JJ Wetherholt for St. Louis has 22 OAA and Luis Arraez, now with Philadelphia following a stint in San Francisco, leads him). However, the work at the plate has been subpar, and it’s not just the box score numbers; it’s the challenge numbers too.
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Chisholm has been the worst Yankee all season long at challenging pitches. He sits with a 33 percent correct challenge rate, and while that’s not the lowest number on the team, he’s also challenged 21 times, the second-most on the team. According to Baseball Savant, Chisholm hasn’t challenged pitches that would be considered reasonable to challenge. Of 23 opportunities he had according to the model, he only challenged eight times, good for 38 percent.
Jazz Chisholm’s 2026 ABS challenges pt.1 | Baseball Savant
Jazz Chisholm’s 2026 ABS Challenges pt.2 | Baseball Savant
Goldschmidt’s presence is a little less of a problem now that the Yankees found Luis Garcia Jr. to take over his role at first base. When he was in the lineup, he was still hitting at an above-average level, so the lack of successful challenges has less of a bad taste. The same could even be said for Bellinger, who is having another excellent year, but is still dealing with the hamstring injury that has left him out of the lineup since July 26th. He appears to be on a faster track than anticipated, and having him back in the lineup would do wonders for the Yankees’ offense. But his challenges to this point in 2026, even though there have only been eight, have not helped the Bombers get the offense moving or continue to move forward.
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Bellinger’s challenge numbers are a bit of a concern considering just how important a cog in the Yankees’ offense he is. He has challenged seven times in 2026 and has only won once. For the most part, his challenges have come on the outside of the zone, and the pitches he’s challenging are so tight that they have low challenge probabilities. But Bellinger challenges them with the confidence that they are balls, and unfortunately, they have all ended up as strikes. So, for Yankees fans watching a Bellinger at-bat, look for opposing pitchers to linger on the outside of the zone, not just because that’s a hard place for any player to create power from. Still, it’s also a potential spot for Bellinger to make a mistake and waste a challenge.
Writing this article without mentioning Austin Wells would be an oversight, too. His challenges behind the dish have helped Yankees pitchers out of multiple jams, and while his season at the plate isn’t going well at all, of his 96 challenges, he has had 59 correct, good for a 61 percent correct rate. That puts Wells 12th-best amongst catchers with 55 or more challenges. So, while trusting him at the plate may be a foregone conclusion, Wells has still been strong behind it, and a tap of the helmet from him shouldn’t be much of a worry for Yankees fans.
The Yankees need their big guns not just to hit the ball well, but to use their challenges effectively. And while some of them have completed that mission so far this season, there are some players in the everyday lineup who need to fine-tune their understanding of how strike zones are going to be called, and, more importantly, when to use challenges in a given game. The postseason is called tighter, and there’s less room for error, so a World Series-winning team will take full advantage of the ABs, but it is also disciplined with its usage.
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