Baseball is a sport that’s often caught between two worlds. It’s a sport that embraced advanced statistics alongside more “old school” scouting and basic counting stats like RBIs, but it’s also one where the “human element” plays a huge role in almost every part of the game — specifically, the home plate umpire who calls either a ball or strike on every single pitch. With the advent of advanced technology like the Pitch F/X system that tracks the location of every pitch thrown in a game, fans have started wondering when the umpire might get put out to pasture — or at least get some assistance from this system that has been installed in all 30 major league stadiums.
A minor-league baseball team let a machine call balls and strikes last night
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MLB might be an organization extremely resistant to change, but fortunately independent leagues like the Pacific Association are free to experiment. That’s how a minor-league game between the San Rafael Pacifics and the visiting Vallejo Admirals had its balls and strikes called by the Pitch F/X system last night. Wired was on hand to check it out, and it sounds like it was a lot less drama than you’d expect — the home plate umpire was freed up to keep a closer eye on other parts of the game. The computer results of the ball and strike data were simply checked out by another umpire at a computer terminal; that ump then made the call over the loudspeaker. It’s the first professional baseball game in which a computer had the final say on balls and strikes.
The first game with a computer calling the plate, but probably not the last
It seems like there were no issues to speak of throughout the game, but purist still may balk at such a system being rolled out in the big leagues for a variety of reasons. Not the least among those is that Pitch F/X doesn’t actually track the ball all the way into the catcher’s mitt — instead, the cameras stop tracking a few feet from home plate and algorithms predict the ball’s final location. Those predictions are supposed to be accurate to within an inch, but for a pitcher trying to put the baseball exactly where he wants it to go, that margin of error could make a difference. Of course, we know umpires blow ball and strike calls multiple times throughout a game, so this is really just a different kind of inaccuracy.
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