I would call myself a baseball lifer. A purist — some would say. Maybe even a tad “obsessed” with the sheer history of a game that has become intertwined with the culture of the nation as a whole over the past century and a half.
I’m sure you’ve heard about MLB’s new rules if you have not lived under a rock over the past month and a half. Restricted shifts, bigger bases and the coup de grâce: the pitch clock. These new rules come from years of exceeding criticism and fallen viewership. But, considering how the Executive Committee handled the Houston Astros’ trash can shenanigans, I was surprised at how quickly they were willing to implement such game-changing rules. Easily Commissioner Rob Manfred’s magnum opus of significant decisions.
Now what do I, a baseball maniac, think of these rules? Shit, I think they’re great. Sub-three-hour games, with more hits and stolen bases? Sign me up! Common sense overrides my demand for purity. The game is objectively better than it has been in the years preceding 2023.
And I’m obviously not the only one who thinks so. Opening Day destroyed the all-time single-day viewing record by over 50 million minutes. Thankfully, that trend has held up throughout the past two weeks. Exact viewership numbers are difficult to verify, but views among the younger population are higher than in the past. That’s the most important thing, really. Generation Z is the most crucial demographical draw, and the game’s future partially lies with their viewership as a group. As long as the kids watch, baseball lives on.
Whether or not you like them, the rules work precisely as MLB intended: drawing more eyeballs onto the on-field product. But why stop there? If baseball is finally changing for the better, it’s time to take the next logical step toward the best possible version of the sport. That, dear reader, would be the establishment of electronic strike zones.
If you asked a casual baseball fan to name any umpire, just one name comes to mind: Angel Hernandez. Not because he’s good or anything, oh no. Because he’s so terrible at his profession, his name has become attached to the current state of umpiring in Major League Baseball.
I’m sure subpar strike zone judgment has been a constant in baseball since the sport was conceived in the mid-1800s, and the union was composed of just 37 states, but technology has progressed quite a bit since then. As a result, not only do we know instantly when a home plate umpire is correct, but we, more importantly, know when he’s wrong. Within seconds, the broadcast has the technology to signal to umpires whether their call was correct, and a quick correction can be made. Other professional leagues have implemented such a system; even Triple-A just started doing so this season. The majors may make the change in 2024. But even if the league decided to do so, it’s too late to rectify the years we’ve suffered at the hands of unnecessary umpire ineptitude.
I know I’ve thrown around the word “objectively” loosely. Still, it is an objective fact that humans will never surpass the quality of a robotic strike zone, and for one big reason — humans are prone to uncontrollable biases. For umpires, the critical bias they often find themselves subject to is a phenomenon known as “anchoring bias,” where the first piece of information influences their judgment on subsequent data. In an umpire’s case, the outcome of the previous pitch — whether a ball, a strike or whatever — has a noticeable effect on how they call the next pitch.
I learned all about this in the 2021 book “The Inside Game” by Keith Law. In Chapter 1, Law cites a 2016 paper that reported the results of a study of every pitch tracked by Pitch f/x from 2008 to 2012. The study found that umpires were 0.9% more likely to call the second pitch a ball if the prior pitch was a called strike. That figure increased to 1.3% if the last two pitches were strikes. In addition, the effect was 10 to 15 times higher on “ambiguous” pitches than on “obvious” pitches.
That may not seem like a vast difference, but the study analyzed 900,000 cases, meaning that thousands of pitches were influenced by anchoring bias. Those could have been entire ball games decided by unconscious decision. The fact that every pitch does not exist in a vacuum — like it obviously should — is a complete travesty. It makes zero sense for umpires to consider what they called previously, deciding what to call for the next pitch.
Hey, it’s not their fault; the human brain is a flawed contraption. It comes down to the fact that humans like things to be friendly and even.
For example, if the count starts at 0-1 and the next pitch is ambiguous, it makes sense for umpires to unconsciously call it a ball because 1-1 aesthetically looks and feels nicer than 0-2.
You know what lacks a brain that thinks like that, though? Robots.
Robotic umpires would call pitches accurately. They do so, of course, without considering what happened on the previous pitch. Wow!
Referee quality could be better in every professional sport. I get that. But it’s unfair that we allow subjectivity to creep in for a role dealing with something so highly objective. And it would be so easy to eliminate. As I said, other professional leagues have switched, and the benefits are clear. So why do the best players in the world need more inaction from higher-ups?
Although you may think otherwise, the Commissioner’s Office isn’t stupid. There’s got to be a reason why they still need to execute the change. So many individuals would only be left with an occupation if I had to point to something. Come on, MLB. Plenty of jobs are available for the visually impaired in the modern world.
Jokes aside, I don’t see this changing anything regarding employment. There would still be a home plate umpire behind the box, performing almost precisely the same duty as he did before. He just gets a notification on a handheld buzzer if the robot says he called something incorrectly. No reason to fire anyone; the labor force stays intact.
If you still don’t believe that robotic umpiring is unnecessary and we can all just suck it up and stop complaining, I’ll leave you with this. UmpScorecards.com, a college-student-run umpire analysis website, has analyzed thousands of home plate umpires since the site’s inception in 2019.
According to their analysis, not only has there been a grand total of one — yes, one — game with absolutely zero incorrect strike/ball calls, but every umpire, not just the Angel Hernandezes of the world, misses obvious calls from time to time. Even the best umpire from last year, Pat Hoberg, was only correct on 95.5% of his calls. Over an entire season, that last 4.5% makes a sizable difference. And he’s supposed to be the best one!
On Tuesday, UmpScorecards’s analysis page on Twitter (@UmpAnalysis) posted the league average accuracy so far this year, which currently stands at 93.9%. That’s the highest the league has ever posted through the first 18 games of the season since pitch tracking became available.
If in just two weeks, at the highest quality we’ve ever seen from umpires, it means that there are still mathematically hundreds of calls that we know are incorrect the instant they are called, there’s something wrong going on. When the best the league has ever done means over 6% of calls are still inaccurate, it’s time they bite the bullet and let the machines take over.
The way the league is trending recently, robotic umpires will be implemented sooner rather than later. These new rules show that they at least have the willingness to change. Whether or not they actually do is still up in the air.
Robotic umpires are an easier change than the pitch clock. I’m optimistic that every Major League player would completely embrace a change that would guarantee the game is called 100% correctly. At the end of the day, I’m all about enriching the on-field product. I want more viewers just as much as MLB does because not only would that give me more people to talk to about baseball, but it would ensure the survival of the national pastime for the foreseeable future.
So, I’m calling on you, Manfred. Make the change before it’s too late. I can’t live forever with Angel Hernandez’s “blown call” compilations on my YouTube feed.