Last week, the machines came for America’s pastime. During the All-Star Game of the Atlantic League—which is independent of MLB’s minor league system, but now a testbed partner for the big leagues—TrackMan Doppler radar was used to call balls and strikes. The “robot” relayed its decisions via wifi to the human umpire on the field, who heard the call in his headphones and then signaled it to the stadium. Crouching behind the catcher the way he always does, the arbiter of the game was rendered nothing more than a glorified middle manager.
If history tells us anything, the Atlantic League’s experiment is just the beginning. And at first glance there is little reason to argue with this glimpse of the future. Much is at stake in sports. Wins and losses can be career-defining events for athletes, coaches and team executives. And there’s also serious money on the line for sports businesses and bettors. Getting correct calls matters.
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Go back to June 2, 2010, when Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga had a perfect game taken away by umpire Jim Joyce, who incorrectly called the Indians’ Jason Donald safe on a close play at first. It should have been the final out, but the game went on because replay review wasn’t yet part of the big leagues.
There are plenty of examples of blown calls and the damage that they’ve done: Argentinian Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal against England in the 1986 World Cup. NFL referee Phil Luckett calling an overtime coin toss the wrong way during a 1998 Thanksgiving Day game, effectively dooming the Steelers. Colorado’s game-winning fifth down against Missouri in 1990, which saved a season that ultimately saw the Buffaloes win their lone national championship.
You might be upset that I didn’t include the example that jumped to the front of your mind, but that’s the point…
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Humans are imperfect. Ask us to officiate a game, and we will make mistakes. Machines are better, their only flaw being that they were built by us. Robot umpires will undeniably make baseball calls more precise, more consistent. But a thought still gives me pause: If we’re taking the human element out of umpiring, what does that mean for the humans who are still playing the games? Will technology turn on them by enforcing the exact letter rather than the spirit of the law?
According to Atlantic League president Rick White, the automated ball-strike system (ABS) is accurate to within an eighth of an inch. In the league’s All-Star Game, there was at least one egregious pitch that was called a strike because the very top of the ball shaved the very bottom of the strike zone. It was an unhittable pitch but a strike nonetheless, the way a pitch in Wiffle ball is ruled a strike if it hits any part of the lawn chair behind the plate—no matter what.
When you consider that the strike zone is three dimensional, invisible, varies in height with each hitter, and that the ball could be moving upwards of 100 miles per hour, you realize that the task of determining whether a pitch is an eighth of an inch in or out of the zone is all but impossible for humans—umpires and batters alike.
Big leaguers have been calling for an electronic strike zone for a few years now, but they may come to regret it. Hitters and umpires have always had disputes over calls at the edges of the strike zone, but at least they are operating from the same vantage point: a strike was ultimately a hittable pitch as seen by the human eye. In the future, we may find that a machine-precision strike zone turns a traditional “ball four” into the new “strike three.”
Just consider what the Atlantic League is already experiencing with the fanfare of its All-Star Game in the rearview…
(Trust me, I understand: human umpires don’t always get decisions right and some are much worse than others—just watch the embedded tweet below. But removing bad umpires from the game, or simply living with bad calls, is completely different than fundamentally changing how games are officiated.)
The worst called strikeouts of the first half #MLB #AllStars #ThursdayThoughts #SignsThatYouLiveInThePast pic.twitter.com/KP62FfGP7b
— Umpire Auditor (@UmpireAuditor) July 11, 2019
Baseball, of course, isn’t the first sport to experiment with using technology to make calls. Tennis players can challenge decisions and call for a review from the Hawk-Eye computer system. After years of resistance, soccer has recently embraced video assistant referees, which we saw in the World Cup. And MLB itself has used replay review for a decade to decide certain types of plays, including boundary calls, missed bases and collisions at home plate. Such use of technology has indeed changed baseball, eliminating the “neighborhood out-calls” on the front end of double plays and turning steals into slow-motion moments that can’t always be seen correctly with the naked eye.
But the strike zone is, well, different. It exists to ensure that a batter has a fair chance of hitting a pitch. Will that still be true with the automated strike zone of the future? Or will we see teams looking to deploy Eephus-pitch specialists who can arc the ball high over home plate and drop it into any sliver of a three-dimensional space that might as well be a backyard lawn chair? (Need a visual? Consider the pitch at the 42-second mark in the video below; that doesn’t seem like a terrible strategy when you consider that even sharp-breaking sliders can cross the front of the plate outside the strike zone but cut over the depth of the plate for a strike.)
Robot umpires are enforcers. They will make decisions based purely on the hard, cold geometry of the strike zone—all science, no art. True, crowds will never sway them. But in the name of infallible consistency we may lose the basic intent of umpires altogether, which is to promote a sense of fairness and enforce parameters that make sense for the game’s human players. And what could be more unfair than an unhittable strike becoming the rule rather than the exception in baseball? In what will surely be a disorienting brave new world, there will still be calls that we know are wrong, that scream of injustice, that … just … can’t … be … right.
And without human umpires, we’ll only have technology to blame.
Will robot umpires be good or bad for baseball? How would you go about improving the tech? Let us know at talkback@sporttechie.com