8 ms·

MLB approves robot umpires for 2026 as part of challenge system

• pseudolus 1y ago
  Bit deceptive. Not robots, just a glorified camera tracking system.
  • mbb70 1y ago
    'robot' meaning 'automated/non-human', a common English idiom especially in non-technical contexts
• ryoshu 1y ago
  Optimize everything so you can take the soul out of it.
  • jayrot 1y ago
    Bad calls are not “soul”. There’s plenty of flair and tradition and flavor in baseball.
  • asdfwaafsfw 1y ago
    If the viewers didn't know it was a blown call, there wouldn't be a problem. That's how baseball worked for 100 years. But now when the viewers can see the pitch in 1000fps 8K slow motion, they expect better from the umpires. The entire premise of sports relies on the assumption that the rules are adjudicated correctly.
    • Loughla 1y ago
      The entire premise of sports relies on the assumption that the rules are adjudicated fairly. Part of the soul of the game is learning the umpire's particular strike zone and adjusting accordingly. I'm with OP. Fun is being replaced by data.
      • eszed 1y ago
        I agree entirely. Baseball is about the accumulation of (very) small advantages. No umpire is being unfair (whatever particular fans may think about certain umpires - though, yes, some are better than others), but each umpire is unique, and learning and adapting to individual umpires' idiosyncrasies is a dimension across which the best players can distinguish themselves. Removing that flattens the game. I don't hate the challenge system as much as I would an entirely-automated strike zone - and I'll probably appreciate the occasional corrected call, and the game-within-a-game of when to spend your challenges - but it's all of a piece with the general flattening of baseball. The DH, and now the universal DH. Interleague play. Balanced schedules. Three true outcomes hitters. Outlawing certain defensive positioning. Maniacal pursuit of spin-rate. Manfred runners. All of these eliminate elements of the game that made it more interesting - at least from this Old Man's perspective. (As counter-examples: I like the pitch clock, and I'm OK with enlarging the bases; those increase the premium that accrues to specific skills, and heighten the stakes of particular situations. Those are the directions in which positive changes should point.)
      • diflartle 1y ago
        "The tie goes to the runner" died with instant replay, and I think that is sad. If you need multiple super slow-motion angles to determine if they were out or safe, it should be a tie, in my opinion. I also just say watch every angle at full speed for those types of replay, no slow-mo. Keeps the magic, but let's you correct egregious calls.
        • asdfwaafsfw 1y ago
          Tie goes to the runner was never in the rules.
          • Loughla 1y ago
            And that's what makes baseball awesome. Everyone knows the tie goes to the runner but it's not an official rule apparently. The soul of baseball is in the squishy parts. Quantifying the life out of it is not a good idea.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • prawn 1y ago
    Look at it from the other direction. If there was a contest between two athletes or teams and it was adjudicated without bias, would you think "You know what would give this more soul? A flawed judge with poorer vision, who may or may not have been pressured or baited before the game to influence their decisions!" Review systems for cricket and tennis seem to have enabled more crowd involvement and anticipation in the lead up to a decision being revealed.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      You could turn it into a meta game. Teams of umpires :P
      • SmellTheGlove 1y ago
        Tape to Tape has a team of refs as an opponent if hockey is your thing!
  • spike021 1y ago
    if a baseball is the width of two or three baseballs away from the "zone" (dynamic based on player usually), then providing a way to challenge the call (it was called a strike when it is clearly a ball) is completely fair and retains the soul of the game. Baseball is really a game of fairness. There's no "buzzer beaters" or timed sessions. Everyone has their chance per inning to impact the game. In a game of relative fairness, adding more strict honesty when it comes to something like this will only improve the game.
• MontagFTB 1y ago
  As a baseball fan, I for one welcome this change. I have seen how the system dramatically improved tennis matches. Players have built an implicit trust in the calls, and the game is more about the athleticism on display than ever before.
  • theluketaylor 1y ago
    I'm a huge fan of the automatic balls and strikes challenge system baseball is going to adopt. Awful calls need to be struck from the game and this should do that. Tonight my Blue Jays had a double taken away on a foul call and a ball 2 inches off the plate called a strike in the same at bat with the bases loaded. Between this and the horrible reviews last week it feels like the fix is by MLB to keep us from winning the division. Unlike tennis where in and out have always been strictly defined and we just didn't have the technology to enforce it, baseball has always involved the human element to the strike zone and some umpire judgement on whether the pitcher hit the spot or just got lucky and what a given batter's zone is. I want some of that to stay, with catchers holding game-long discussions about the zone with umpires, and batters having their own sense of the zone. I don't want full automatic balls and strikes, so I like the challenge. There is some new strategy on when to deploy it and who can be trusted to recognize a missed call. It leaves some room for a pitcher and catcher to work a corner over a few innings to expand little by little.
    • eszed 1y ago
      I'm against ABS in general, but this is a good take - and why I'll be OK, though not enthusiastic, about this challenge system.
  • spike021 1y ago
    I think as long as they use the limited challenge system, framing skills can still co-exist and matter. I only hope they don't switch to a system entirely governed by an automated strike zone without umps. It'll allow the "human element" many players still prefer along with some level of framing, while keeping umps honest (there are way too many egregious calls these days).
• iambateman 1y ago
  Remarkably, the television wasn’t the technology that forced the MLB’s hand on this. You would think it would…football and tennis went for challenges a long time ago, and viewers can easily see when an ump misses a call. But baseball has managed to stay human on balls and strikes for a long time. Then along comes sports betting and they basically have no choice but to use robots. It’s sad to me how much sports betting changes sports. When I watch, I wonder if the referee has accepted a bribe every time a call is a little funky. Considering the millions of dollars riding on every play, some of them must have taken some money at some point.
  • 14 1y ago
    It is almost impossible to fully remove that voice in the back of your head that will question if you were cheated. Because the fact is at the end of the day sports are played by humans and humans make mistakes, humans are susceptible to bribes, humans are susceptible to threats and there are many other factors that could influence or force cheating by players or bad calls by the officials. There are literally countless incidents of people cheating. So my suggestion is to hope it doesn't happen but also just avoid making bets if you are not comfortable with the fact that you may lose.
  • syndacks 1y ago
    How did you come to that conclusion that this is a function of betting? As a baseball fan, this feels like a long overdue feature (at least in the world of video review challenge). I think it's simply going to make the game better. MLB is losing to the NFL/NBA, and they need to put out a better product.
    • tw04 1y ago
      They’ve had the technology for over 20 years. The only thing that’s changed in the last 5 is betting.
      • SapporoChris 1y ago
        I couldn't count the number of things that have changed in the last five years. However, related to Baseball here's a small list to start. https://www.baseball-almanac.com/rulechng.shtml https://www.baseball-almanac.com/rulechng.shtml
• deleted 1y ago
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• jcalvinowens 1y ago
  Nothing makes me feel more like a grumpy old man than the new strike zone box. My favorite part of watching a baseball game with friends was the heated arguments about what was or wasn't a strike. I realize that it's an objectively ridiculous thing to have strong feelings about, but boy do I hate it :D
  • Loughla 1y ago
    No, I'm with you. And maybe it's just because I'm an old man, but this is another place where joy and wonder (meaning arguing with friends lol) are replaced with data. It just sucks some of the fun out. The quest for eternal optimization is exhausting.
    • dehrmann 1y ago
      MLB lost the narrative of what it is and what people like about it. It's looking at other sports, seeing what they're doing, and starting to take itself too seriously.
    • whartung 1y ago
      We’ll see but I don’t think that’s going to be the case. The primary use case is the glaring wrong calls. 1/2 a ball in/out of the zone called wrong. The batter/catcher/pitcher have to do the challenge, so, ideally, the “obvious” ones should be readily challenged. But the close calls, the squeakers, the players have very little time to make the challenge and we saw lots of failures in Spring Training this year. So, there’s still a lot of judgement and uncertainty to deal with. And don’t forget the the Umpires have been being evaluated based on the automated box for years. They review each game and the Umpires performance. It’s just not had actual game impact before. I have no doubt that there will be some important, game impacting “bad calls” going forward. It just that there will be fewer of them. Also be interesting to see if the get extra challenges in the post season/WS games.
  • Spivak 1y ago
    In a very literal sense a non-trivial part of the entertainment value of sports has been taken from you. I don't think it's ridiculous at all, I think the people making the decisions to have computer accurate refs don't understand what makes sports fun to watch holistically.
• jackconsidine 1y ago
  Safe to assume ejections will fall off dramatically. I remember Lou Pinella being thrown out of Wrigley Field because a runner was called out at 3rd base a few years before challenges. Pinella was wrong and in another world he would have simply challenged the call rather than kicking dirt at the ump. Wilson Contreras got thrown out a few weeks back for theatrics after a ball / strike call. The last frontier of ejections will probably be discretion when players get plunked at the plate.
  • eszed 1y ago
    Yeah, and I'm an old man, so let me lament how this takes some more fun out of baseball. Those arguments were always a bit of kayfabe, but they were glorious! Who didn't love Earl Weaver kicking dirt on homeplate, or Billy Martin endangering his blood pressure, or Tommy Lasorda turning himself into a tomato? Bleah.
    • JamesSwift 1y ago
      > Who didn't love [...] :raises hand: Granted, I didnt grow up a baseball fan and am only now getting into through my kids being in baseball, but coming from less "traditional" sports like basketball I really dont care for the whole spectacle side of baseball. Even in little league you get way more arguing with umpires from coaches and parents alike and its all so juvenile.
      • michaelcampbell 1y ago
        Right there with you. The faux drama (soccer/football "flops", F1 drivers complaining of 'dangerous' actions of everyone else), of some sports is as bad as the actual theatrics and temper-losings of others. Takes away from the playing, for me.
      • eszed 1y ago
        I'm right there with you on any kind of argument or hostility in youth (or adult rec-league - I can tell you stories about that) sports. It's awful, and out of place. I guess I reconcile those positions because I follow the "top-flight" sports I enjoy (in part) as long-running, interconnected narratives. Some of that's on the technical level - like, "this guy played this way last time; how will he approach a similar situation this time" - but it also embraces the personalities involved. The three managers I mentioned were outsized characters in the baseball "story", and I enjoyed their roles - as did they. Each was well aware of the theatricality of their actions, as were the umpires, and there were very few genuine hard feelings. Earl Weaver, in particular, sometimes ran onto the field bellowing something like "that was a good call! But you gotta run [eject] me here, 'cause I need get them [players / fans] into the game" (though doubtless with more profanity than is appropriate for this forum). Then he and the umpire would yell at each other for a bit, until he departed in (mock) high dudgeon. That was kayfabe, but not purely for the sake of spectacle. He believed - and there's research since that backs up his intuition - that getting his team and fans fired up would be a strategic advantage. None of that applies / should apply to amateur competitions. I also respect your point of view if you don't watch professional sports from same the angle that I do.
• jake-qwokka 1y ago
  It's been pretty wild to watch the MLB go through the exact same arguments that the Cricket world went through 15 years ago when DRS was first introduced. The game will be fine.
  • abhinavk 1y ago
    It's a net positive but wide/no-ball DRS slows down the game a lot.
  • ra7 1y ago
    There’s universal agreement that DRS has massively improved cricket, but the sport was already using technology for decision-making well before DRS. In fact, Hawk-Eye was first used in cricket before gaining popularity with tennis. I’d go as far as to say cricket has been the best adopter of technology in sports for a long time.
  • whycome 1y ago
    I had to look it up. But yet, the system seems to be framed as helping the official rather than some third party to overcome a dispute. It looks like the umpires can decide to get the review on their own?
    • dotnet00 1y ago
      In cricket, yeah, the umpires can ask for the review themselves. Sometimes it isn't really clear, like, if the ball is caught very close to the boundary line, given the size of the field, it can be tricky for the umpire to tell if it was caught over the boundary, representing the difference between the current batsman being caught out (meaning either the next batsman has to come take his place - assuming there are any of the 11 left) or adding 6 runs to his team's tally. Some of the most memorable cricket games have had such situations. It also adds some suspense to games as everyone waits on umpires to review data to make their call.
• vessenes 1y ago
  Overall this seems good to me, esp. since it’s limited to 2x a game, leaving space for framing and other human elements to the calling, like make up calls, which I generally think are good. That said. Strike zone height is between 53.5% and 23% of a player’s height. WTFBBQ. That’s a major change, and I don’t understand how it’s going to go with an Ump’s calling the zone — right now a player’s stance can affect the zone height. How will umps assess 53.5% of a player’s height realtime?
  • dyauspitr 1y ago
    Cricket has already been through this and it has only improved the game and made it more fair.
    • whycome 1y ago
      I wish mlb would bring all the cricket tech. The audio meter thing is wiiiiild. (Where they use high precision microphones to determine if the ball made contact with the bat). Also there’s no excuse for not having full 360 3D representative video for each base. Having some sort of pressure sensor would be useful too. Better safety features would be useful (like better face protection like the cricket steel grill). And just more damn cameras for all the edges (like home run or foul lines).
• NaOH 1y ago
  Some numbers: A typical MLB game sees about 292 pitches thrown. Of the pitches called a ball or strike—so ignore any pitches fouled off or put in play—93% are called correctly by umpires. That's equivalent to umpires missing a call every 3.6 batter appearances. So in terms of volume, this isn't much. In terms of potential effects, it becomes a question of how well players utilize their teams' two challenges (teams retain challenges if they correctly use them, but only the batter, the catcher, and the pitcher can request a challenge). It all becomes an interesting question in terms of strategies. A catcher when he's batting? Does he want to risk one of his team's challenges as a batter that he might want for his pitcher? A mediocre hitter in a low-stakes situation? Does he want to risk one of his team's challenges? What about a really good hitter in a low-stakes situation? Lots here for teams to consider, and since it's up to the players to decide on a challenge (not managers or coaches), teams will have to determine their approaches such that players can make decisions without assistance.
  • evdubs 1y ago
    This obscures the fact that umpires are worse than 93% when the pitch is close to the boundary of being a ball or a strike (shadow zone). Obvious balls and obvious strikes are obvious, but umpire accuracy when it is close is only 81%, and their accuracy was even worse 15 years ago. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/strike-three-lets-check-in-on-umpire-accuracy/ https://blogs.fangraphs.com/strike-three-lets-check-in-on-um...
    • NaOH 1y ago
      Right, but as that article notes, the numbers show it's an average of 4.5 pitches per team in the shadow zone in each game. And those pitches are not clear-cut instances where players will be confident in challenging, more like 50/50. So what remains is how teams decide to let their players use this finite challenge resource.
• nextworddev 1y ago
  Guess we don’t care about AI taking jobs as long as it’s not developer jobs
  • jrockway 1y ago
    I'm only a casual baseball viewer, but balls and strikes are so easy to see on TV and the umpires miss a lot of obvious calls. It makes a lot of sense to make this a game mechanic that is managed by the machine, rather than requiring humans to judge this. Humans are still judging baserunning and the more subjective aspects of the game. I'll also note that MLB isn't doing the "replace umpires with software". Teams get 2 challenges to use, and those are adjudicated by robots. The initial call is made by humans and a human has to say "use my finite resource to engage the robots". (I would just make all calls by robot and have a challenge to have humans look at it, but whatever. Baby steps. We know where this is going.) The NFL uses the same technology to measure first downs now. No more carrying the chains out to measure by hand. But the officials still spot the ball where they think they play ended, so the computer isn't doing anything important. It's just doing the tedious part. Nobody is losing their job and no fun is being removed from the game.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • Dylan16807 1y ago
    If this is a joke, sorry, I'm just tired of it. If it's not a joke, please realize this doesn't replace anyone and is also not doing anything that's meaningfully "AI".
• mef 1y ago
  They had this during spring training and it was fantastic. The challenge limit meant it was used rarely, but when it was used it added a fun dramatic element. Players getting to stick it to umpires when they got it wrong, and umpires getting to smirk at players when they got it right. And at the end of it all, some missed calls get to be corrected.
  • cstone 1y ago
    Agreed - Plenty of hitters have experience with it as well, since it's been around the minors for even longer than this season. I saw it in practice a few times this year during spring training games, and it was _fast_. Add to that the fact that only pitchers, catchers, and hitters can request one (no managers holding the game up while the replay room checks on it), and it really won't slow the game down at all.
    • whycome 1y ago
      The fun part will be seeing how teams learn to game the system. The batter can call it, but I think it would be hard to stifle any kind of communication from the dugout. /something higher tech than banging a garbage can obviously.
      • carefulfungi 1y ago
        It will be fun to see if teams prefer batters or catchers use the system. Or if they will coach either side to use it situationally. I think, so far, catchers have better challenge success rates?
• blackbell 1y ago
  Cannot come fast enough. The proposed system eliminates some glaring issues.
• Wendycutler06 1y ago
  [dead]
• dillydogg 1y ago
  I personally don't care for the challenge system because if the ABS is the ground truth, why aren't we using that for every single pitch? Why put the burden on the batter to say "tell me the correct call" when you could just have the correct call be radioed into the umpire's earpiece? It just means that the rules of the game aren't being applied every pitch, just when the batter asks. I do not find this to be a strategically interesting role for the batter to play. I want them to bat well, and hit the ball. Not have to sit there and have a call we know for certain is incorrect go through because their team happened to challenge the wrong calls earlier in the game. I just cannot imagine a situation where I think it is better for a call that we know is incorrect to stand. I know this is an ice cold take, but if the tech is there, just use it.
  • whycome 1y ago
    It’s the slippery slope and necessary path so umpires can maintain a role. I really wish it could be a fully automated system that just immediately displays whether a pitch is a strike or ball. The umpires could be reserved for other judgment calls. Maybe 20 years from now there won’t be an umpire behind the plate.
    • llbeansandrice 1y ago
      There’s plenty of judgement calls that will always need to be made close to home plate so I don’t think the home plate ump is ever going away
    • JamesSwift 1y ago
      The system as implemented maintains both the umpire and the catchers role (in terms of framing pitches). I can appreciate the elegance of the solution to meet a middleground, but the "fairness gremlin" in me just wants calls to be consistent and correct.
• ratelimitsteve 1y ago
  heartbroken that the practical upshot of this isn't using the existing automated system to actually call balls and strikes rather than our current system of letting umpires call balls and strikes and then using the existing automated system to shame them. I was hoping for fully-robotic umpires a la SNES cult game Super Baseball 2020. I was also hoping that they'd just switch to letting the existing system get every call right instantly and automatically rather than a challenge system that intentionally limits the number of calls that are made correctly while slowing down the pace of play and increasing costs.
• westurner 1y ago
  That year they finally did it. They finally replaced you, sir, the ump with a robot. How long until we have an AI president with an economics degree?