Alabama baseball earned a double bye in the SEC Tournament by finishing 4th in the league standings with an 18-12 conference record.
The tournament is already underway, but Rob Vaughn and the Crimson Tide won't play until Thursday, thanks to that double bye. When they take the diamond in Hoover, they'll experience one major change this year that could be the future of the sport.
Taking its lead from the MLB, the SEC will experiment with ABS challenges during the tournament. ABS stands for automated balls and strikes, and each team will get three challenges per game. If you win your challenge, you keep your challenge. If you lose the appeal, that challenge is gone.
The MLB has found great success with ABS this year, and fans have seemed to enjoy the added aspect of the game. If you disagree with a ball or strike call, you have a split second to appeal it, and then the ABS system will either confirm or overturn the call.
If the SEC finds success with it this week in Hoover, this could be something that is implemented for good moving forward as they try to model the league after the major leagues.
Rob Vaughn speaks out on the ABS challenge system in the SEC Tournament.
"ABS is gonna give and take man, it's gonna give and take," Vaughn said in his postgame press conference after Alabama knocked off Ole Miss to clinch an SEC Tournament double bye. "I think it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I love that the SEC is kinda on the cutting edge, trying to align ourselves with Major League Baseball to see if this is something we want to implement at a bigger level moving forward."
Alabama's first experience with the ABS system will take place on Thursday. The 4-seeded Crimson Tide will face either 5-seeded Florida or the Vanderbilt/Kentucky winner. The winner of the Commodores/Wildcats matchup will face the Gators on Wednesday, with the winner advancing to Thursday's quarterfinal matchup against Alabama.
The Crimson Tide enters the SEC Tournament having almost certainly clinched a Regional hosting spot, and they could be on the verge of positioning themselves as a national seed, which would allow them, by winning the Regional, to host in the Supers for the first time since 1999.
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