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.”

“In the past twenty years, sports have moved away from judgment calls. Soccer has Video Assistant Referees (for offside decisions, for example). Tennis has Hawk-Eye (for line calls, for example). For almost a decade, baseball has used instant replay on the base paths. This is widely liked, even if the precision can sometimes cause problems. But these applications deal with something physical: bases, lines, goals. The boundaries of action are precise, delineated like the keys of a piano. This is not the case with ABS and the strike zone. Historically, a certain discretion has been appreciated.”

I decided to email Alva Noe, a professor at Berkeley University and a baseball fan, for his opinion. “Hardly a day goes by that I don’t wake up and run through the reasons that this [robe-umpires] is such a terrible idea,” he replied. He later told me, “This is part of a movement to use algorithms to take the hard choices of living out of life.” Perhaps he’s right. We watch baseball to kill time, not to maximize it. Some players I have met take a dissenting stance toward the robots too, believing that accuracy is not the answer.