At
Part 1
of our three-part series on The Future of Baseball, we looked at new rules designed to make the sport more appealing. In this episode, we turn our attention to an innovation designed to make the sport more equitable: the Automated Ball-Strike System— ABS for short, but commonly referred to as “robot umps.”
Grumbling at the umpire is as much a part of baseball as“peanuts and Cracker Jacks,” but that may soon be a thing of the past. Major League Baseball, in fact, has been testing an automated system for batting and fielding balls for years, and it seems only a matter of time before we start seeing this system at the highest level. What does this innovation mean for the future of the sport?
HAWK-EYE & VAR
In 2006, the Hawk-Eye system was introduced in tennis. From then on, players were allowed to use a certain number of challenges per set to contest decisions they believed to be incorrect. Thus, in that sport, such an automated system has been in use for nearly 20 years, and the response has been generally positive.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the comparable VAR (Video Assistant Referee) in soccer. All too often after a game day, the talk is about remarkable decisions made by the men in the booth on the stadium sidewalk, but then again, they are often based on interpretation. In that regard, the Automated Ball-Strike System in baseball would be more like the Hawk-Eye used in tennis. After all, whether a pitch went through the strike zone can be determined with the same certainty under a properly functioning system as whether a tennis ball is in or out.
CHALLENGES?
It seems all but certain that ABS is actually coming; only the details remain unclear for now. Will all calls be made by these so-called“robot umps,” or will the initial decision—as in tennis—still essentially be made by the umpire behind the plate and then be challenged by a manager, batter, or fielder? In the latter case, there would still be a tactical element, because what does a manager risk by challenging a call, and when should you use your challenge?
Currently, in Minor League games, a batter may tap his helmet to indicate that he is challenging a call, and a catcher may do the same.
https://x.com/FutureSox/status/1774141766733602899?s=20
So it remains to be seen when and how ABS will be implemented, but it seems certain that it will eventually make the sport much fairer. Most people will welcome the fact that refereeing decisions will start to play a smaller role in the outcome of a game, but secretly we’ll miss the furious tantrums of players like Kyle Schwarber anyway, so one more time to unlearn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzE0LGb6xLw