Valley News to Major League Baseball: “Kill the (robotic) umpire!” Baseball traditionalists (team name: “The Luddites”?) were surely taken aback by news last week that for the first time in a professional game a computer was used to call balls and strikes.
The occasion was the Atlantic League All-Star game, in which home plate umpire Brian deBrauwere presided wearing an Apple Airpod in his right ear connected to an iPhone in his back pocket, which in turn communicated calls — “ball,” “strike” or “did not track” — from a computer screen overlooking home plate. (DeBrauwere continued to rule on the rest of the home plate umpire’s duties, such as check swings, foul tips, catcher’s interference and plays at the plate, as well as making ball and strike calls when his robotic partner had its eyes closed.)
The rollout of the robotic umpire software, which employs 3-D Doppler radar, is one of a series of experiments in rule changes that the independent Atlantic League is conducting this season as part of a three-year agreement with Major League Baseball, which is trying to figure how to speed up the game in the digital age and provide fans with more offensive fireworks. Most, but not all, of those possible changes are appalling, but for the moment we confine ourselves to the hard-nosed software arbiter.
In the official rulebook, the strike zone is defined as: “That area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the knee cap.”
Despite the precision of the rulebook description, umpires for many decades have interpreted the strike zone in their own way, and for the most part they are remarkably consistent in doing so. But for the knowledgeable fan, part of the enjoyment of the game-within-the-game is to see how pitchers and batters adjust to slight variations in the strike zone as delineated by the calls of the home plate umpire on a given night. Yes, these minor variations sometimes lead to bickering. But that ongoing conversation — which the fan usually must infer from subtle signals of body language since rarely can it be heard — can itself be intriguing.
The general consensus after the Atlantic League game was that the computer software did a good job, although it called higher and lower strikes than its human counterparts generally do, while squeezing the pitchers on the edges of the plate.
The bigger issue is that anything that dehumanizes baseball is not in its best interest. Failure is the foundation of this most difficult game, in which making an out seven out of every 10 at-bats is counted an unqualified success and perfection is vanishingly rare. Certainly, umpires can and do make mistakes, just as players, managers and coaches do. And when they do, baseball truly imitates life. To err, after all, is human.
The advent in recent years of video replay review of certain calls (excluding balls and strikes) has already robbed baseball of one its signature attractions, the furious jaw-to-jaw dispute between a player or manager protesting a call and an umpire equally determined to vindicate it. We much preferred the day when the umpire’s word, rather than a replay screen’s, was law.
Indeed the digital revolution has done the game no favors to date. The advanced metrics now used to slice and dice every at-bat, indeed every pitch, have given rise to defensive shifts in the field that make it much harder for batters to get a hit. The result has been a dramatic falloff in hits and a corresponding rise in strikeouts as more and more batters conclude that trying to hit the ball over the fence is the best way to beat the shift. When the ball is not put into play frequently, boredom ensues. Major League Baseball could do everyone a favor by banning those shifts, rather than an obsessing about the tempo of the game.
As for the ball-and-strike software, we note with satisfaction that it went down for half of the fourth inning, which will hardly surprise anyone whose daily bread is earned, in whole or in part, by computer. While an MLB technical guru tried to get the system back up, deBrauwere called balls and strikes the old-fashioned way. With a human touch.