CLEARWATER, Fla. — Proving the home plate umpire wrong on a pitch call is every baseball player’s dream. But, once they get that power, it’s not always easy to know when to wield it.

Take Maverick Handley, an Orioles minor league catcher who spent last season in Triple-A Norfolk. With the years he’s put behind the plate, he figures he knows the strike zone as well as anyone. But he was mightily humbled last season when he used baseball’s new robot ump challenge system three times in one inning — two on defense, one as a hitter — and lost all three calls.

“I remember I got a little shit from it — like, of course, you gonna get chirped a little bit,” he recalled with a painful chuckle. “It definitely was like, ‘Yeah, probably we’re not gonna do that again.’”

But with any new rule change, as has become the norm in baseball these last few seasons, time breeds confidence and good judgment. This spring, as MLB implements its automated ball-strike system in a handful of spring training games (Florida State League parks are equipped with the cameras that register the calls), Triple-A players have the distinct advantage of knowing the virtual strike zone better than even their major league counterparts.

Although ABS is not yet a regular-season feature, the future is coming — and the players who have gotten to challenge pitches know how exciting it is.

“The challenge system is like what baseball needs to come to,” the Orioles’ Coby Mayo said. “I love it.”

What minor leaguers have already learned — and what baseball fans will see this spring — is that the challenge system will benefit organizations like the Orioles that preach from the gospel of swing decisions and controlling the strike zone for hitters.

It’s a tweak that, on average, adds just 17 seconds to games and can be called as quickly as reviews in tennis. But it also could set up moments of high drama. Last season there were multiple times when the Tides reviewed pitches on the last out of the game.

“It was a strike three, we changed it to a ball, and you live to see another pitch,” Mayo said. “You always try to save one for like, you know, seven, eight, nine. I remember some situations where we challenged pitches on the last pitch of the game.”

Unlike the lengthy challenge review processes that bog down the NFL and NBA, baseball’s ABS system process takes moments — fast enough for the casual viewer to miss. On Sunday, catcher Samuel Basallo became the first Oriole this spring to win a challenge on a fifth-inning pitch to Phillies slugger Kyle Schwarber. No sooner had the Brandon Young pitch, dead center across the plate at the knees, landed in his glove then the 20-year-old reflexively reached up to tap his helmet, the signal for a challenge.

Within seconds, the system validated Basallo’s judgment and home plate umpire Vic Carapazza changed it to a strike, leading to a Schwarber groundout to end the inning (manager Brandon Hyde said postgame that Carapazza told him it was his first challenge experience).

As recently as last fall, Basallo wouldn’t have been as quick to act, but experience with ABS last year in Triple-A has given him confidence.

“I didn’t use it [last season] as much as maybe one would think,” Basallo said Sunday through team translator Brandon Quinones, “just because I was scared to fail.”

The Orioles have encouraged players to ignore their fears. Then-Tides manager Buck Britton told his team at the outset of the season to let challenges rip as they saw fit. Any challenges must be issued by the pitcher, catcher or hitter immediately after the call without aid from the dugout, anyway, so the Tides’ policy encouraged going with gut instincts.

“I know in some organizations like they there were managers that would not let their guys challenge unless it was late in the game,” Handley said. “Versus us, we were told, ‘We’re gonna keep track of who’s good at it and who’s bad at it. If you’re bad at it, you’re gonna not be able to do it.”

There were days like Handley’s three-dud outing that made him the butt of his teammates’ jokes. But over time the calls evened out. MLB reported that the overall Triple-A challenge success rate was 51% (54% on defense, 48%) on offense, which seems like a good marker for an exceptionally fair system.

More importantly, Handley noticed, was that the way Triple-A umps called the games changed as they got a feel for which pitches ABS would flag — truly egregious pitches with speed and late breaks that drop out of the zone, for example.

For hitters, they no longer could just grumble about umpires robbing them with a bad pitch call — not using challenges creates accountability for them, too. Last season, Mayo got an apology from an umpire for a called strike that went against him the day before — but he told him, “You’re good. I could’ve challenged it, but I didn’t.”

The whole system is smooth, enhances accountability and creates the opportunity for dramatic reversals that could make the game a lot better.

“I think it’s possibly going to bring some excitement to the game on a big pitch in a big spot,” Hyde said. “Everybody’s eyes are gonna go right to the Jumbotron.”

At 6-foot-5, Mayo hopes there’s extra benefit to tall hitters like himself who get bullied by pitches beneath the zone — “You see like [Aaron] Judge and Gunnar [Henderson] last year, they got a lot of calls that were balls down but called a strike.” For Handley, it could validate his knowledge of the strike zone, which he takes pride in as a catcher.

For baseball fans, the system should be a win-win — as long as it arrives in the majors soon.