‘Robot’ umps may not solve strike zone dilemma
Spirit of the law has been as much a part of the game as peanuts and Cracker Jack
Midway through the World Series, baseball appeared to be striding inevitably toward the world of robot umpires.
A couple of egregiously blown calls behind home plate in Game 5, both of which went against the Washington Nationals, had turned the focus of the sport’s biggest stage to whether it was time to finally admit that infallible human eyes are not the ideal instrument to measure the path of a 100-miles-per-hour fastball or a 92-m.p.h. slider.
A few days later, much of that talk had been overtaken by events. There were whole new controversies: the Donald Trump-booing controversy, the bat-carry controversies, the Trea Turner controversy.
The Nationals also won games 6 and 7, which took a lot of the sting out of having been robbed by the umps on the way to falling into a 3-2 World Series hole.
This wasn’t the NFC title game of 2019 then, when a botched pass interference non-call directly cost the New Orleans Saints a Super Bowl berth, leading to Jared Goff and the L.A. Rams being thoroughly pantsed by the New England Patriots and, eventually, a rule change.
And yet robot umps could still become a thing. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said last week that some form of automated strike zone will be implemented in at least one minor league next season.
This is news to be both welcomed and feared.
Technological innovation works best in sports when it can quickly provide an objective measurement of something that otherwise is left to human subjectivity. The goal-line technology widely used in soccer, for example, or the Hawk-Eye system in tennis. In each case, all-seeing cameras and computers compensate for the fact that the human eyes of the officials aren’t always in the ideal place to assess whether a ball is in or out. The call comes quickly, everyone understands that the verdict is final and that’s that.
Such objectivity should be possible with the strike zone because it’s defined in the rule book and the technology exists to properly assess whether a ball passes through that defined space. Cameras that completely map the field of play are already in use in many instances, gathering real-time data on elements like launch angle and spin rate.
But the rule book and how baseball is traditionally called are quite different.
Umpires rarely call high strikes and often call them on low pitches. And while the rule considers a pitch to have been a strike if any part of the ball touches any part of the zone, this hasn’t been the case in practice. Pitches that barely nick the edge of the strike zone are usually called balls and are almost always called that way if the catcher doesn’t frame it properly.
While robots would eliminate the annoyance of umpires who all have unique interpretations of the strike zone, they would also deliver calls in the short term that would baffle hitters and pitchers alike. An automated system has been deployed experimentally in the Arizona Fall League and the results included some wonderful clips of pitchers who pounded their mitts after missing a pitch only to discover that they were just awarded a strikeout.
It’s not a stretch to imagine that the advent of robo-zones would require a baseball-wide rethink of what exactly constitutes a strike.
Soccer provides a template for what can happen when technology is used to apply a black-andwhite assessment to a rule that had long been applied subjectively. The offside rule states that an attacker cannot be beyond the last defender when the ball is played to them. The purpose is obvious enough: it prevents players from lollygagging behind the defence all game.
But increased use in recent years of video replay review has now led to goals being overturned because the merest sliver of a foot is technically offside. Such calls may be accurate by the letter of the rule, but not the spirit of it. Once you turn the decision over to a computer, though, the spirit of the law is no longer a consideration. We have several decades’ worth of sci-fi movies to prove it.
But leaving an element of human subjectivity in there has its faults, too. Witness the NFL, where they changed replay rules to make pass-interference calls reviewable this season, but they are hardly ever overturned. If you leave some wiggle room so that only “clear and obvious” mistakes are fixed, you end up right back where you started: with a fallible human assessing some other fallible human’s judgment.
You would like to imagine that baseball could find a happy medium: technology that would provide a truly uniform strike zone without expanding it so much that the game is fundamentally altered.
But this is MLB, the league that oversaw a dramatic increase in home runs this season due to balls that flew farther and then a drop in the post-season due to balls that flew less far and professed each time to have no idea how that happened.
Robot umpires could work. But the more I think about it, the less convinced I am that they will.