During Wednesday night’s All-Star Game in the independent Atlantic League, a hitter who disagrees with a called strike won’t be able to turn toward the home plate umpire and argue with the source of his frustration.
Instead, the arbiter of balls and strikes will be a square black box hanging from the roof of PeoplesBank Park in York, Pa. The TrackMan device, which uses a 3-D Doppler radar and powers Statcast’s pitch and batted-ball tracking in all 30 big league parks, will be used to call balls and strikes—meaning a virtual strike zone has finally arrived in baseball.
A home-plate umpire will still be crouching behind the catcher, but his job is merely to vocalize the ruling. The ump will carry an iPod Touch connected to a secure stadium WiFi network and wear an AirPod in his ear. He’ll be told either “ball” or “strike” after each pitch and then announce the radars’ call.
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“There’s no question that it is more accurate than any human being,” says Atlantic League president Rick White. “It is within a matter of degrees—not a matter of inches, not a matter of half an inch, [but] a matter of an eighth of an inch.”
In February, major league baseball partnered with the Atlantic League to use it as a testing ground for new rules, including moving the mound back two feet and letting batters steal first base on any dropped pitch, not just the third strike. The most headline-grabbing experiment to be implemented thus far is the “automated ball-strike system,” or ABS, which casual fans may think of as a robot umpire.
Soon after the partnership news broke in February, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred appeared at SportTechie’s State of the Industry conference in Brooklyn and downplayed the imminence of the ABS reaching the majors. At the MLB All-Star Game in Cleveland this week, he reiterated that thought and told reporters the league was merely doing its due diligence.
“We hear all the time from players, ‘Why don’t we have an electronic strike zone? Why don’t we have an electronic strike zone?’ We try to be responsive to those sorts of expressions of concern,” Manfred said in a press conference. “We have spent a lot of time and money on the technology. It’s not just to address player concerns. It obviously has broadcasting uses. That same technology can be used in our broadcasts. It has value to our fans. But we feel it’s incumbent on us to figure out if we can make it work.”
This season, the Atlantic League has let human umpires continue making official calls while testing the ABS system in the background. Over the past several months, MLB’s technology team developed software to turn the x-y-z coordinates registered by TrackMan into a binary ball-strike decision. The two leagues also worked through several iterations of how to communicate the result to the umpire most efficiently and then to convey the decision to players and fans.
Along the way, they nearly ran afoul of FCC regulations. ABS previously relied on a radio or walkie-talkie to signal ball/strike decisions to the human umpire, but the leagues discovered that keeping a radio frequency open for the duration of the game would require an FCC license. That was one factor in switching to secure WiFi. MLB and the Atlantic League also worked through whether it was best to call pitches over the public-address system, via the scoreboard, or with some other visual representation. Ultimately, they deemed it best to keep the ritual of the human umpire intact.
“We are very confident of what people are going to observe on Wednesday,” White says. “So confident, I think, that many people are going to be bored. They’re going to say, ‘So what?’ That’s good, though, if you think about it.”
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The home-plate umpire must still closely follow each pitch. In rare instances, the radar system could also say “no track” if a pitch doesn’t register, in which case the umpire must call the pitch as he sees it. Currently, there is no provision for an umpire to overrule the automated system, though that has been discussed and could be implemented if there are egregious errors.
Most often, the home-plate umpire will focus on other duties, such as calling check swings, fair-four calls, and out-safe on base-running plays at the plate.
“The times are changing, and it’s something that we should probably embrace,” says Atlantic League umpire Brian deBrauwere, who will be behind the plate for the ABS debut in the All-Star Game. “If the game and the players want a more consistent strike zone from the computer, then that’s what we’ll give them.”
Early testing has shown the system to be very fast, reporting ball or strike calls to the human umpire at roughly the same time the pitch reaches the catcher’s mitt. If a hitter swings and misses on a pitch out of the strike zone, ABS will still say “ball,” so the umpire will have to ignore what’s reported into his ear. (The recorded voice, incidentally, belongs to an MLB Advanced Media voiceover specialist.)
The boundaries of the strike zone are universal and defined by the width of home plate, which measures 17 inches across. The upper and lower limits are defined in the MLB rulebook as the area between the “midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants” and then “the hollow beneath the kneecap” during the hitter’s batting stance.
About 60% of Atlantic League rosters are populated by players who have logged some MLB service time. Those players already have a strike zone registered in the TrackMan system. The remaining 40% will need a couple regular season at bats for their own custom zones to be created; in the interim, they will receive the average of all players of the same height.
“The times are changing,” says Atlantic League umpire Brian deBrauwere. “If the game and the players want a more consistent strike zone from the computer, then that’s what we’ll give them.”
Compared to his regular strike zone, deBrauwere expects the radar-powered system to call things a little tighter on the corners but add more strikes higher up in the zone. The baseball rulebook says that a pitch need only to touch any part of the zone in order to be a strike, which is a 3-D space over the entire pentagonal plate and not just a 2-D box that is commonly rendered on TV broadcasts. A slider with a sharp horizontal break, for instance, could cross the front of the plate outside the zone but then cut over the depth of the plate and still be a strike.
The start of the 2019 season has been a beta test of ABS, but the Atlantic League hopes to have the system up and running in all of its ballparks by the end of the season.
As for its debut in the All-Star Game, deBrauwere says, “If that means we don’t yell at each other about balls and strikes for a night, then that’s fine. But I’m sure they’ll find other things to yell at me.”
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