I am serious. There is no need for them any longer. Cameras can now make all the correct calls.
The players themselves know if a pitch (not swung at) is a strike or a ball MOST of the time. If there is any doubt, the camera and the little ESPN pitch zone box will make the decision.
The players (and most people watching) also know when a runner is safe or out and again, if it is close, the camera will make the decision. In fact, replay is now being used on close plays if a manager contests the call.
Of course, once in a great while, there may be a play so close, it can’t be decided even by video replay. In that case, flip a coin. It is only a game.
I love baseball as you can see by my choice of a name for this site. But when you really think about it, why let a fallible human make erroneous calls when we have the technology to get 99.999999999% of calls correct?
Get rid of them.
And please don’t argue about the “sanctity of the game” The “sanctity” went out with astro turf and the DH.
Balls and strikes, I can agree with. Too many plays on the bases that need someone on top of the play.
Replays take too long now, I’d hate to see 10-15 per game.
It’s just become possible to do this. It will happen over time. But an ump still needs to be at every base to see things that can be hidden from the camera. Flipping a coin won’t be satisfactory in those circumstances.
On which millions of dollars is spent and is at stake on.
But hey, if you think the average fellow baseball fan is okay with having 0.1% or whatever of important calls decided randomly, go ahead and advocate. What could possibly go wrong?
What can be hidden from the camera? Watch the MLB channel. There are so many cameras at the games and on each play now, it is very hard for there to be anything an umpire could see that a camera could not.
The “entertainment” is watching SKILLED players competing against each other in this great sport on a level playing field, not letting a single person, an umpire, make a bad call that changes the outcome of a game.
It is a boring game. Excitement in baseball comes from anything out of the ordinary or a close game in the final innings. You can use replay rules to eliminate most of the bad calls, but you’ll still be left with bad calls from the booth anyway. Eliminating the umps altogether will just make the game even more boring.
Im not 100% convinced the strike zone boxes shown on TV are 100% accurate. Ok, the width is easy, you have a stationary home plate. But the height of the strike zone is the players elbows and knees, and they can move a lot during the pitch, and throw off an electronic strike zone; what are we going to now put in sensors in the players elbows and knees? How long is that going to take to produce? Don’t gorget we have to have other sensors on the other axis to determine where the ball was when it crossed the plate. Now we have to hire someone to set the seniors based on which side of the plate the batter is on.
Maybe one fair compromise would be for the electronics determine “inside” and “outside”, but the ump still has to make a high low call. I guess that would be the ump making that decision, than looking towards a green or red light on the scoreboard, and then determining the final call.
It just sounds messy to me. Umpires get the call right 99% of the time.
That would be precisely the way it has been for over a century except that it’s not 0.1% of plays, it’s way more. Umpire accuracy on balls and strikes is simply not good enough.
MLB umpires are the best there is among humans, but they are not good enough; even after years of using Pitch/FX to help their performance they miss 15-30 pitches a game, on average. We should be using Pitch/FX for ball/strike calls, starting tomorrow. Why on earth one would leave to human error a judgment that can be made alm0ot perfectly by a machine I do not for the life of me understand.
I do not agree, however, with getting rid of umps, since, of course, you need SOMEONE to tell the players what the hell the outcome of the play was. Most plays are very obvious, of course, but even on a close play you need someone to say “okay, he’s out.” Even if that guy was told that by the replay office. For field judgments, the umps are very rarely wrong on safe/out calls and the like, and the replay system works okay. Were I to improve it I’d have it to so more resources were devoted to instant replay review - EVERY call should be reviewed in real time, and a reversal should be communicated to the umps, even if the manager does not challenge the call, within seconds of the play ending. And of course you do need umps to maintain discipline, as Oakminster points out.
Fuck that noise. I was watching a Jays game over the weekend. In one at-bat, the first two pitches were called strikes but the pitch tracker had them a mile off the plate. “Maybe it’s miscalibrated?” the commentators mused. So they showed a slow-mo overhead replay, and the pitches literally passed through the batters box – that’s six inches off of the plate!
As an added bonus, the pitch tracker will never ring up a batter because he doesn’t like his attitude. It won’t give star players a more favourable strike zone than others. It won’t be fooled by pitch framing (I saw a recent estimate recently that Buster Posey is worth one WAR so far this season just based off of his pitch framing). It won’t be intimidated by the crowd into giving the home team favourable calls.
I realize this attitude is actually not uncommon. It’s also wrong.
If a star pitcher needs favourable calls to get outs, he shouldn’t be a star pitcher. Sports should be determined by the actual performance of the players. To the greatest extent possible, the officiating should be as physically perfect as can be economically managed. Pitch/FX works far better than human judgment and so human judgment should be eliminated. Tomorrow.
Having people calling balls and strikes and getting ten percent of them just totally wrong is exactly the same as having an Olympic downhill skiing competition determined not by a proper timing system but by some guy counting “One Mississippi, two Mississippi…”
I’m just commenting on the entertainment provided by the fallibility of umpires. I think replay rules and strike calling electronics should be used, but not the elimination of umpires. Baseball is losing popularity because it is such a slow boring game. That will get worse with the diminishment of bad/questionable calls. Whether or not umps stay or go, whether or not machines replace human judgment, the game needs to be made more interesting in order to survive as a major sport.
The game would not be one tiny bit less interesting without it. There is no marginal entertainment value in umpires blowing calls.
Baseball isn’t losing popularity and isn’t slow or boring to anyone who likes it, which is, apparently, many millions of people. People having been saying this for fifty years (maybe more, actually.) It has been the same story for longer than you or I have been alive; “baseball’s too slow, people don’t like it anymore” and all the while it’s been getting more popular. It wasn’t true in 1965 and is not true now. MLB attendance is basically as high as it has ever been (it did drop a little after the recession, but that isn’t because it’s less popular, it’s because people were losing their jobs) and MLB revenues set new records every year. Not one person out of the 75 million or so who attend a ball game this year is going to stop going because there aren’t as many blown calls.
My guess, to be honest, is that current attendance figures are pretty much the ceiling, barring expansion. There is a practical limit to how much consumers in 30 markets can spend on professional baseball when salaries aren’t increasing very much, and I think we basically hit that limit in the last ten years; there are only so many games, so many teams, and so much money people are willing to fork out. But to say attendance will decline because of fewer blown calls is just silly. Nobody’s going to stay away because of that.