Invasion of the Robot Umpires

A few years ago, Fred DeJesus from Brooklyn, New York became the first umpire in a minor league baseball game to use something called the Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS), often referred to as the ‘rob-umpire’. Instead of making any judgments himself about a strike*, DeJesus had decisions fed to him through an earpiece, connected to a modified missile-tracking system. The contraption looked like a large black pizza box with one glowing green eye, it was mounted above the press stand.

Major League Baseball (MLB), who had commissioned the system, wanted human umpires to announce the calls, just as they would have done in the past. When the first pitch came in, a recorded voice told DeJesus it was a strike. Previously, calling a strike was a judgment call on the part of the umpire. Even if the batter does not hit the ball, a pitch that passes through the ‘strike zone’ (an imaginary zone about seventeen inches wide, stretching from the batter’s knees to the middle of his chest) is considered a strike. During that first game, when DeJesus announced calls, there was no heckling and no shouted disagreement. Nobody said a word.

For a hundred and fifty years or so, the strike zone has been the game’s animating force – countless arguments between a team’s manager and the umpire have taken place over its boundaries and whether a ball had crossed through it. The rules of play have evolved in various stages. Today, everyone knows that you may scream your disagreement in an umpire’s face, but you must never shout personal abuse at them or touch them. That’s a no-no. When the robe-umpires came, however, the arguments stopped.

During the first robe-umpire season, players complained about some strange calls. In response, MLB decided to tweak the dimensions of the zone, and the following year the consensus was that ABS is profoundly consistent. MLB says the device is near-perfect, precise to within fractions of an inch. “It’ll reduce controversy in the game, and be good for the game,” says Rob Manfred, who is Commissioner for MLB. But the question is whether controversy is worth reducing, or whether it is the sign of a human hand.

A human, at least, yells back. When I spoke with Frank Viola, a coach for a North Carolina team, he said that ABS works as designed, but that it was also unforgiving and pedantic, almost legalistic. “Manfred is a lawyer,” Viola noted. Some pitchers have complained that, compared with a humans, the robot’s strike zone seems too precise. Viola was once a major-league player himself. When he was pitching, he explained, umpires rewarded skill. “Throw it where you aimed, and it would be a strike, even if it was an inch or two outside. There was a dialogue between pitcher and umpire.”

The executive tasked with running the experiment for MLB is Morgan Sword, who’s in charge of baseball operations. According to Sword, ABS was part of a larger project to make baseball more exciting since executives are terrified of losing younger fans, as has been the case with horse racing and boxing. He explains how they began the process by asking fans what version of baseball they found most exciting. The results showed that everyone wanted more action: more hits, more defense, more baserunning. This type of baseball essentially hasn’t existed since the 1960s, when the hundred-mile-an-hour fastball, which is difficult to hit and control, entered the game. It flattened the game into strikeouts, walks, and home runs – a type of play lacking much action.

Sword’s team brainstormed potential fixes. Any rule that existed, they talked about changing – from changing the bats to changing the geometry of the field. But while all of these were ruled out as potential fixes, ABS was seen as a perfect vehicle for change. According to Sword, once you get the technology right, you can load any strike zone you want into the system. “It might be a triangle, or a blob, or something shaped like Texas. Over time, as baseball evolves, ABS can allow the zone to change with it.”