If Major League Baseball institutes an electronic strike zone, they might as well just build humanoid robots to play the game instead of actual humans.
If the league is striving for perfection with balls and strikes, then why not also strive for the same with its players?
Sarcasm aside, umpires made the correct calls on 97% of pitches during the 2018 season according to a July Bleacher Report story.
Subjectivity exists in a borderline ball or strike call and it should stay that way.
The strike zone itself isn’t a static box, it’s dynamic based on the person who is at bat. MLB’s rulebook says “the official strike zone is the area over home plate from the midpoint between a batter’s shoulders and the top of the uniform pants.”
Aaron Judge, 6-foot-7 New York Yankees outfielder, has a significantly larger strike zone than Jose Altuve, 5-foot-6 Houston Astros infielder.
While the corners of the strike zone should theoretically stay the same for all hitters, this would take away from a pitcher’s strategy when it comes to how to pitch to a certain hitter.
If a pitcher and catcher decide that they want to attack a certain hitter on the inside corner, and the pitcher hits the target consistently, those pitches should be called strikes.
It’s a way to reward a pitcher for showing great command of his arsenal even if the pitch is slightly off the plate.
If a pitcher is all over the place and clearly isn’t hitting the targets his catcher is putting down, an automated strike zone would reward that pitcher for being wild even if the pitch is technically within the strike zone.
“Here’s the No. 1 problem I have with it: If you go to a robot umpire, then we completely eliminate catcher framing, throwing to a spot, having your catcher receive it,” Washington Nationals pitcher Max Scherzer said in the Bleacher Report article.
With that being said, it seems inevitable that electronic strike zones will make its way into MLB regardless.
Starting next season, some minor league stadiums will institute electronic strike zones, according to The Athletic.
Details on which stadiums will use the system are still being decided by the league.
“I think it’s incumbent upon us to see if we can get the system to the point we’re comfortable it can work,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said. “I only would go to an automated strike zone when we were sure that it was absolutely the best it can be. Getting out there too early with it and not having it work well, that’d be a big mistake.”
While I appreciate the amount of testing that seems to be happening, I hope it’s an experiment that dies in the minor leagues.
The Atlantic League, which is an independent baseball league, tested an automated strike zone during the 2019 season.
The system that judges the pitches, called TrackMan, relays the call to the umpire, who still has to verbally make the ball or strike call.
The umpire hears the call through an earpiece, which basically looks like a wireless earbud, and said “ball” or “strike” accordingly.
Even with an electronic strike zone, the umpire still needs to be out there making the call. He could be in a rocking chair while he does it, but he still needs to be there.
At the very least, the home plate umpire still needs to be there to call plays at the plate and check swings.
The best way to solve the robot umpire conundrum is to come up with a compromise. Most calls in MLB can be reviewed, so it seems appropriate for balls and strikes to also be reviewable.
I don’t think every single pitch should be reviewable, but pitches that could potentially end an inning or force in a run with a walk, for example, should be reviewable.
This would eliminate some of the controversy, particularly since some of the more important moments when ball and strike calls truly matter are in those types of circumstances.
MLB does not need electronic strike zones, it needs to kill the system before the sport is forever tainted.
