Ejections fell in baseball's first challenge season, except in the Giants dugout

The count was 3-and-2 and there was one out in the third inning of the last game of the season. Mookie Betts had just held up on a 2-2 fastball from Sam Hentges, and first-base umpire Marvin Hudson said he held up in time. Tony Vitello slammed a hand on the dugout rail, walked onto the field and into a conversation with plate umpire Ryan Blakney that ended the way his conversations with Blakney end. Blakney had thrown him out of a game against Cincinnati on August 26, also in the early innings, also over a checked swing, per Maria Guardado of MLB.com.

On the next pitch, Betts struck out on a foul tip.

So the Giants got the out anyway and lost the manager (a fair summary of a lot of September). The Dodgers won 5-1 in 10 innings for their 100th win. The Giants finished 65-97, 35 games back. And Vitello finished with seven ejections, the most ejections of any manager in the majors this season and the most by a National League manager since David Bell had seven for Cincinnati in 2023, per Jack Baer of Yahoo Sports.

Here is the part that makes seven stranger than it sounds. This was the season baseball took the strike zone out of the argument.

The automated ball-strike challenge system, approved by the league's Joint Competition Committee last September, gives each team two challenges to start a game. A batter, a pitcher or a catcher can ask the tracking system to rule on a called ball or strike. The manager cannot, per MLB.com. The pitch that used to be worth a trip out of the dugout, the called third strike on the black, now gets settled by a replay graphic in about the time it takes to be mad about it.

And the ejection line in the league's own box scores says it worked, at least at the plate:

Plate umpires threw out fewer than half as many people as they did a year ago. Managers were ejected 70 times, down from 92. The complaint department got a self-service kiosk and the line at the window shrank.

Base umpires, meanwhile, ejected nearly twice as many. That is where the argument went once the strike zone left it: to the calls nobody can challenge.

Vitello found both windows. Five of his seven came from the plate umpire and two from the third-base umpire, and the list reads like a man trying every window that is still open. The first, on April 5 against the Mets, followed a batter-interference call on Jerar Encarnacion, per the play-by-play. The second did not come until July 11. Then the season went where it went, and the ejections went with it: Kansas City on July 22, Cincinnati on August 26, Arizona two days later, the Mets on September 5, the Dodgers on Sunday. Four of the seven came after August 25.

The checked swing is the purest version of the problem. The rulebook has never said what a swing is in a way anybody can measure, the plate umpire can ask a base umpire, the base umpire decides from down the line, and the challenge system does not touch it. Nobody on the field can appeal it to a machine, so the only appeal on offer is a manager's voice, and a manager uses it.

None of this made the Giants unusual in kind, only in quantity. Their dugout accounted for 11 ejections this season, the most of any club: Vitello's seven, plus Logan Webb, Adrian Houser, third-base coach Ron Wotus and Frank Anderson, the organization's director of minor league pitching (a title that does not sound like it comes with a turn at the window, and yet). The 2025 Giants had seven, four of them Bob Melvin's.

Some of this is a first-year manager who came straight from the University of Tennessee dugout, learning which fights the major league job lets him have. Guardado made a version of that point on Sunday, writing that a manager with no professional experience before this season seemed to get less leeway when things got heated. That is a read about how he has been treated, and it cuts in both directions. A shorter leash only matters if you keep walking to the end of it.

The machine answer is already being tested two hours up Interstate 80. Since early May, the Triple-A Pacific Coast League has tested a check-swing challenge, per Anthony Franco of MLB Trade Rumors: a batter, pitcher or catcher can ask bat-tracking to rule whether the bat head broke 45 degrees past the handle. The Sacramento River Cats, the Giants' top affiliate, play in that league. So the call that got Vitello thrown out of his final game of 2026 already gets settled by bat-tracking in a stadium in West Sacramento, and none of it reaches Oracle Park yet.

If it ever does, he is going to need a new window.

Sources: MLB Stats API box score and play-by-play for game 823164 (September 27, 2026) for the ejection, the umpire, the inning, the count and Betts' strikeout; box scores for games 823238, 823198, 824083, 823180, 823178 and 823577 for Vitello's other six ejections; MLB Stats API box scores for all 2,430 completed 2025 regular-season games and all 2,429 completed 2026 regular-season games for the league ejection totals, by the umpire position each box score records; MLB Stats API standings for the final records. Maria Guardado, MLB.com, September 27, 2026, for the check-swing arguments on August 26 and September 27. Jack Baer, Yahoo Sports, September 27, 2026, for the Bell comparison. Anthony Castrovince, MLB.com, April 13, 2026, for the challenge system's rules. Anthony Franco, MLB Trade Rumors, March 16, 2026, for the Pacific Coast League check-swing test. MLB Stats API team records for Sacramento's league and parent club.