In Florida and Arizona, where ballplayers have emerged from their winter slumber into the citrus- and saguaro-scented breezes of spring training, pro ball is now arguing about umpires.
The sport has long done this, but there’s a new twist. For the first time, the major leagues are testing robots behind the plate. Human umpires still bark balls and strikes. If a pitcher, batter, or catcher doesn’t like a call, they can now object. An automated system then settles the matter.
That sounds simple enough. Baseball already has instant replay, introduced in 2008 to review whether runners are safe or out on the base path. And, for now, the new system is just a preseason experiment.
Yet for some, this feels different. “We’re humans. Can we just be judged by humans?” asked Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer. “What problem are we really solving?” he posed to The New York Times.
Artificial intelligence is already changing baseball. Teams are using ever more sophisticated algorithms to analyze players and determine game strategy. Computerized umpiring, formally called Automated Ball-Strike System, however, hits at the game’s central contest – a battle between one person with a rock and another with a stick, each testing the other at the extremes of human endeavor.
Baseball is a game of fractions of time and space that puts into play a restless pursuit of dominion over fallibility. When pitchers throw great games, they evoke – to borrow the language of British art curator Catherine Milner – masterpieces “like the Sistine Chapel or Venus de Milo [that] embody a devotion to excellence in their precision and gracefully balanced composition.”
Yet, as in fine art, baseball’s beauty flowers in the imperfections and subtle deceptions that reveal human striving. With human umpires, good catchers “frame” pitches and good pitchers make microadjustments to paint the edges of subjective strike zones. If they miss the mark, good hitters make them pay for it.
That interplay of human judgment is baseball’s rebuttal to a world of constant digital advancement. “Soul is kinda important in this increasingly techno world, and if we have to lose a little accuracy [on the ball field] to acquire that soul, well, that’s a currency worth expending,” wrote Steven Zeitchik, a longtime tech and sports journalist, on the online platform Substack.
Mr. Zeitchik isn’t completely sold on his own argument. Human umpires make bad calls on less than 4% of pitches, according to Statcast. But society is already concerned about human displacement by AI. “If we start saying that an AI shouldn’t replace a [home] plate-measurer, … it’ll make people inured to listening when the humans really do add something valuable,” he wrote. The beautiful art of arguing about umpires goes on.