The Chicago Cubs’ ninth-inning rally ended Saturday night when home-plate umpire Mark Wegner called strike three on Ben Zobrist. The deciding pitch, a slider from Arizona Diamondbacks reliever David Hernandez, appeared to be a couple inches low, at least to everyone in a Cubs uniform. All Zobrist could do was stand at the plate with his right hand up, questioning Wegner in the moment and telling reporters afterwards that the time has come for an automated strike zone — i.e. robot umpires.
“If we want to change something like that, we’re going to have an electronic strike zone because human beings are going to make mistakes,” Zobrist said. “Tough situation for that to happen, but he’s probably going to look at it and not be too happy with himself.
“That’s something the league is going to have to look at, when you start ending games and games turn on one pitch like that. It’s an unfortunate situation, and now that we have the technology, we should probably get it right.”
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Cubs manager, Joe Maddon, even authored a first-person piece in the New York Post last month calling for robot umps, saying that because instant replay had been successful, automating the strike zone should be next: “I think the next logical step to that would be balls and strikes being influenced and impacted, technologically speaking. It would be a more homogenized step on a daily basis. So am I advocating for ‘robot umps?’ If you’re looking for a level playing field where skill really wins, methodology wins, I think that’s the way to go. No one’s trying to influence the game, but umpires are human and make mistakes.”
Some argue that the technology already exists. ESPN’s Buster Olney reported that some players have recently voiced their support for an automated strike zone. Former player Eric Byrnes, who is now an MLB Network analyst, has staged a pair of charity events at independent baseball games using robot umpires with reportedly minimal hiccups. Byrnes has said on air, “It is a matter of time, with the way the game has been evolving, before we see an automated strike zone.”
Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, on the other hand, has resisted the clamor for robot umpires, saying at the Associated Press Sports Editors meeting last month, “The assertion that we are there from a technology perspective is incorrect at this point. It’s hard to argue against technology getting to a certain place given what we’ve seen over the last two decades. Soon or later, we are going to have technology that will be accurate and fast enough to call a computerized strike zone.”
MLB already uses the automated Zone Evaluation system — the successor to the reviled QuesTec tool — to offer grade umpires on how they call balls and strikes. That system does, however, have a two-inch margin for error; that’s about half the width of a baseball. The zone may not be quite as precise as players and fans would like, but that’d be enough to correct egregious mistakes. Truth be told, the third strike to Zobrist appeared to fall into that category by one metric: the radar-based Statcast technology that powers MLB.com’s Gameday tracker showed the pitch to be well below the strike zone.
The optical Pitch F/X system, however, indicated that the final strike was at the very bottom of the zone in a graph on BrooksBaseball.net.
As Manfred said on a panel of sports commissioners last month, “We do have a system that we use in broadcast that measures balls and strikes. In all candor, that technology has a larger margin of error than we see with human umpires. Some day I think it will be up to the task of calling balls and strikes. But I actually believe at that point that you have to ask yourself a question as to whether you want to take that human element out of the game and replace it with a machine.”
The current strike zone continues to show some inconsistencies. Jon Roegele of The Hardball Times has carefully researched the zone’s dimensions since 2009 and has shown that the zone expanded significantly — by about 40 square inches — by 2014 with almost all of the growth at the bottom. The zone remained relatively consistent for three seasons before showing some signs of contraction through the first half of 2017. Notably, the average zone for left-handed batters has been a little smaller than for righties, particularly on the inside corner. That’s the type of deviation that an automated zone would be expected to correct.
MLB has proposed raising the strike zone about two inches from its current bottom border at the hollow below the kneecap, although the players’ union did not assent for that change to be implemented this year. The collective bargaining agreement, however, allows for the league to unilaterally make the change next season. Installing an automated strike zone would also require approval from the umpires’ union and is not imminent, although it might be inevitable.