During Spring Training of 1950, Brooklyn Dodgers President Branch Rickey introduced an electronic umpire to the team’s Vero Beach training camp. Rickey had no intention of replacing umpires with machines. He saw the innovation as more of a teaching tool. But the implication was clear.
…That automatons could do an equivalent if not better job than the men in blue.
Skipping straight to the epilogue, Rickey’s machine never caught on. Still, the argument has persisted to the present day. In 2016, an episode of the HBO series, Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, helped bolster the popular belief that umpires—particularly those behind home plate—are incompetent. After analyzing roughly a million major league pitches over a three and a half year period, Yale Professor Toby Moskowitz told Real Sports reporter Jon Frankel that more than 30,000 erroneous ball/strike calls are made each season for an overall accuracy rate of eighty-eight percent.
…Not an especially impressive number to say the least.
Writing for the Kansas City Star in 2017, journalist Lee Judge groused about a blown call made by home plate umpire Marty Foster in a game between the Royals and Twins. In many televised games, networks superimpose computerized graphics on the screen so fans at home can see which pitches land within the strike zone. These graphics are generally considered to be extremely accurate. Analyzing the network data, Judge determined that Foster missed thirteen calls during the game, including a critical one that should have given the Royals their second out of the ninth inning.
Commenting on computerized strike zones, Chicago TV producer Marc Brady said: “Humans have bad days. Computers don’t. Maybe the sun angle affects the umpire’s view of a pitch…or maybe he’s just freezing and wants to go home. A computer has nowhere to go.” Thinking along those lines, former major leaguer Eric Byrnes pondered: “Why do millions of people sitting at home get to know whether or not it’s a ball or strike, yet the poor dude behind home plate is the one who’s left in the dark?”
Why indeed?
Well, the answer is rather complex. Aside from the fact that baseball is a sport steeped in tradition, there are other obvious reasons. Not everyone supports the idea of an automated strike zone. Multimedia sports personality Joe Giglio cautioned that: “As with any technological advancement, it could come with issues. If the strike zone was ‘off’ or malfunctioned, baseball would either have to empower the umpire to make the correct call or deal with the missed pitches.” Former National League umpire Harry Wendelstedt went one step further, proposing humorously: “If they did get a machine to replace [umpires], you know what would happen to it? Why, the players would bust it to pieces every time it ruled against them. They’d clobber it with a bat.”
With offense on the decline and strikeouts dramatically on the rise in the majors, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred made an arrangement with the independent Atlantic League to implement various experimental changes. In addition to moving the pitching rubber back from its standard sixty-feet, six-inch placement, Atlantic League president Rick White agreed to begin using “robot umpires” during the 2019 season.
The so-called “robo-umps” don’t look anything like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in the Terminator movies. The technology is actually known as TrackMan. It’s a 3D Doppler radar system that precisely measures the location, trajectory and spin rate of hit and pitched baseballs. The device can be precisely aligned to the strike zone to determine balls and strikes. Most major league parks already have the devices in place, though they have mostly been used for coaching and scouting purposes.
After a series of questionable calls in the 2019 World Series, Commissioner Manfred announced that the electronic strike zone would be used on an experimental basis in selected minor league ballparks during the 2020 campaign. In particular, the Class-A Florida State League was mentioned as a possible setting. The MLB Umpires Association officially agreed to cooperate with the development and testing of the technology in conjunction with a new five-year labor contract.
No matter how the experiment turns out, the fact of the matter is that home plate umpires (in some capacity) are likely here to stay. And it’s difficult not to sympathize with them given the demanding nature of their jobs. According to retired American League arbiter Nestor Chylak, officials are expected to “be perfect on the first day of the season and then get better every day.” Adhering to an extremely convoluted rulebook, they make hair-trigger decisions knowing that their calls will affect the fortunes of the players and teams involved.
Despite their imperfections, umpires have played a vital role in the game’s history. Former major league commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti described the public perception of umpires in figurative terms: “Baseball fits America well because it expresses our longing for the rule of law while licensing our resentment of law givers.” That resentment has flourished for a very long time.
Whether we sympathize with them or not, it is an irrefutable fact that the decisions of umpires have dramatically altered the fabric of baseball history. In the heat of the moment, mistakes are often made. And the consequences of these mistakes have been monumental at times.
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