Jared Diamond reports in the Wall Street Journal:
Baseball’s future has arrived. Experimental rules for Major League Baseball designed to improve pace of play and generate action include the prohibition of mound visits and defensive shifts, shorter inning breaks and enabling hitters to “steal” first base on any pitch not successfully caught in the air. But last week marked the introduction of the most significant innovation: an automated strike zone, shifting responsibility for calling balls and strikes from a person to technology free of the biases and inconsistencies of mere humans. If the test goes well, the days of big-league players imploring umps to schedule an eye exam could come to an end.
Facing a 3-2 count in the seventh inning here Friday night, T.J. Rivera of the Long Island Ducks let a borderline changeup pass by, tossed his bat away and jogged toward first base. He thought he had drawn a walk to break up a perfect game by opposing pitcher Rick Teasley of the Somerset Patriots.
Five steps down the line, Rivera heard home plate umpire J.B. Torres deliver those two dreaded words: strike three. Rivera glared back at Torres, preparing to plead his case, when he remembered an important detail: Torres didn’t actually make the call. A little voice in Torres’s head told him to do it.
“[Rivera] said to me, ‘I was trying to get that walk, but I forgot it’s not on you tonight—it’s on the computer,’” Torres said.
Baseball’s future has arrived in the Atlantic League, a collection of eight independent professional teams that span from New Britain, Conn., to Sugar Land, Texas. In February, the Atlantic League reached a three-year agreement to audition a series of experimental rules for Major League Baseball to evaluate, largely designed to improve pace of play and generate action. These include the prohibition of mound visits and defensive shifts, shorter inning breaks and enabling hitters to “steal” first base on any pitch not successfully caught in the air.
But last week marked the introduction of the most significant innovation: an automated strike zone, shifting responsibility for calling balls and strikes from a person to an emotionless piece of technology free of the biases and inconsistencies of mere humans. And if the test goes well, the days of big-league players imploring umps to schedule an eye exam could soon come to an end.
Ducks manager Wally Backman predicted that MLB will adopt the system within five years.
“It’s going to happen,” he said. “There have been a few pitches that are questionable, but not as many as if it was a human. The machine is definitely going to be more right than they are.”
Every Atlantic League stadium, including the Patriots’ TD Bank Ballpark in Central New Jersey, now features a TrackMan device perched high above the plate. It uses 3-D Doppler radar to register balls and strikes and relays its “decision” through a secure Wi-Fi network to the umpire, equipped with an iPhone in his pocket connected to a wired earbud. That umpire, positioned behind the plate as normal, hears a man’s voice saying “ball” or “strike” and then signals the verdict.
Over the past few months, the Atlantic League considered other methods of communication. They tried using radio waves instead of Wi-Fi, but learned that doing so without the proper licenses could run afoul of FCC policy. Officials initially gave umpires a wireless Apple AirPod to keep in their ear, but abandoned that approach over concerns about battery life. They also tinkered with the possibility of putting lights on the scoreboard to visually represent the call or sending audio tones instead of words to the umpire’s ear.
In the ballpark, it all looked seamless, with Torres calling strikes after just the slightest of delays. Of the 259 pitches thrown Friday, Torres said he personally agreed with TrackMan on all but six of them.
“I didn’t have a fear in the world of having to look at someone and say, ‘That was there’ or, ‘That had the corner,’’ Torres said. “It was, ‘Hey, this is the earpiece. You want to talk to the earpiece?’”
Without a doubt, TrackMan calls a different strike zone than its mortal counterparts. Pitches at the letters—a strike according to the rulebook, but almost always ruled a ball in modern baseball—get called as strikes. The same goes for breaking pitches that might technically nick the bottom of the zone, even if they wind up at the batter’s feet, resulting in the occasional strike that stretches credibility. TrackMan gives no leeway on the corners.
For that reason, Patriots manager Brett Jodie said Clayton Kershaw, a pitcher known for his big curveball, would love the automated strike zone. Greg Maddux, who relied on two-seam fastballs on, or just off, the edges of the plate probably wouldn’t. (The league has already tinkered with the system to require the entire ball to cross the uppermost edge of the zone to trigger a strike and could do something similar for low strikes.)
“The rulebook strike zone is a certain thing, but that strike zone has long since disappeared in the game of baseball,” Jodie said. “Now they’re trying to get it back.”
Players expressed mixed feelings. They appreciate the consistency of the automated strike zone and the lack of egregiously bad calls, but they lament some of the elements of the game that it eliminates.
The computer renders “pitch framing”—the coveted ability by catchers to receive a pitch in a way that tricks umpires into seeing balls as strikes—irrelevant. Patriots pitcher Nate Roe recalled throwing a pitch in a recent game that badly missed his target on the outside corner, instead landing on the inside corner. It forced the catcher to stretch far across his body, moving his glove completely across the plate. Roe said with a human umpire, that pitch “is probably called a ball.” TrackMan, not influenced by how the pitch looked, called it a strike.
Some players called that a positive, arguing that intent shouldn’t matter. After all, a referee doesn’t wave off a basketball shot that a player banks in accidentally or declare an incompletion when the wrong receiver catches a quarterback’s pass. Others say the humanity of umpires adds to the game.
Patriots catcher Mike Ohlman, who appeared in seven games for the Toronto Blue Jays in 2017, brought up the example of a persistently wild pitcher who rarely receives the benefit of the doubt on close calls because, “You have to earn that strike.” He sees that as a tradition worth preserving.
“The plate’s 17 inches wide,” Ohlman said. “If you set up outside, you miss by 17 inches and it catches the inside part…we’re professionals here—you shouldn’t be rewarded.”
For now, MLB plans to observe how well the automated strike zone does before determining what happens next. It will almost certainly move to the minor leagues before going to the big leagues.
Until then, umpires will continue calling balls and strikes with their judgment alone—and players and mangers will keep calling them blind.
“We feel it’s incumbent on us to figure out whether we could make it work,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said. “That’s what we are doing.”
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