Let’s talk baseball and robot umpires.
The regular season ends tomorrow, and the REAL season, postseason play, begins next week. Excitement reigns. Just like when the regular season begins, your favorite team is 0-0, and die-hard fans think their assembled team will carry them from the cellar to the championship. Well, it is postseason, and optimism takes hold again, as even if your team barely made the wild card spot, homers (hometown fans) believe in their hearts that they will be downing champagne and hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy in celebration of winning the World Series.
Now let’s get down to what I think we need to change. Today, let’s talk about human home plate umpires vs. robot umps.
Analytical data shows that umpires missed 34,294 ball-strike calls in 2018, and this year will end with about 30,000 wrong ball-strike calls. I was watching the Yankees-Red Sox game Sunday and saw umpire Joe West consistently call outside pitches strikes, miss a few in the zone and completely mess with the integrity of the strike zone.
Aaron Judge is 6-foot-7 …how big do you have to make his strike zone? Analysis shows that Judge leads the league every season in missed calls that go against him. Umps call low pitches (really low to him) strikes, and it is a foregone conclusion that the pitcher will spin the next one lower, causing Judge to chase and whiff.
A hitter who knows his strike zone gets penalized and puts him at the pitcher’s mercy on wide or low strike calls that were out of the zone. Likewise, a pitcher who paints the corners high and low gets penalized and must lay one in … both scenarios are recipes for disaster. West is terrible, but he is the tip of the iceberg. The ball-strike call is the most important call of the game… every call is. The difference of one strike in an at-bat can be huge. For example, hitters are batting .318 with an .840 on-base-plus-slugging percentage through Aug. 1 when the count is 0-1. That drops to .142 with a .369 OPS when the count is 0-2. It spikes back to .339 with a .918 OPS if the count is instead 1-1.
There is no reason for an umpire to be part of the true outcome of a game when we have 3-D technology used in tennis to make correct calls. I don’t know about you, but I don’t care if a call goes for me or against me as long as it is the right call every time. Bring on the robots. We already use replay and cameras. It is time for robots at home.
And if you argue that it disenfranchises the “skill” called “pitch framing,” it is a skill that should make no difference to the call or the game. A catcher receives the ball AFTER it has crossed the plate or strike zone. When a catcher reaches across to catch a ball thrown in the zone but away from the target, he doesn’t get the call of a true strike, and often a catcher sets up outside the zone and positions his glove to frame the catch and gets the strike … within the rules, but borderline cheating nonetheless.
What do you think? Is it time for robots and true and accurate calls?
See you next time.
