Dan Bellino had his CB Bucknor moment during Monday’s game.
The veteran MLB umpire Bellino was behind the plate on Monday for the Athletics-Atlanta Braves game at Truist Park in Atlanta, Ga. Athletics first baseman Nick Kurtz was leading off the game in the top of the first inning and saw a low 0-2 offering by Atlanta’s Bryce Elder get called strike 3 by Bellino.
Kurtz immediately tapped on his helmet to initiate an automated ball-strike (ABS) system challenge. In the end, it turned out that Bellino’s call was so wrong that it glitched out the system entirely.
Normally, ABS challenges will provide an accompanying visual on just how many inches the ball was actually off the strike zone (in the case of a mistaken call). But in Bellino’s case, the ball was in such a different galaxy that the ABS visual could not even provide a measurement.
Here is the video.
Thank goodness for ABS.
— js9innings (@js9inningsmedia) March 31, 2026
This was a called third strike on Nick Kurtz, he immediately challenged and ABS showed this pitch was NOWHERE near the strike zone pic.twitter.com/ZaNtUoXLKG
Bellino, 47, has been umpiring games in MLB since 2008 and is also notably the president of the Major League Baseball Umpires Association. While that whiff in Monday’s game was pretty awful, at least it was not as utterly humiliating as the aforementioned Bucknor getting six different calls overturned by ABS in one game last weekend.
