I’m a little torn on robot umpires. For the sake of accuracy and getting rid of the sometimes egregious bad strike call, sure I’m for it. But they would need a guy behind the plate who gets the call into a mic in his ear so he can yell “Steeeee-riiiiiike threeee!” Just wouldn’t be the same with a red light or whatever robot indicator.
They need the guy behind the plate to call swings, foul balls and plays at the plate anyway.
Nah, just let the robots do it.
No, you sti8ll need a home plate umpire. What the umpire needs is a machine that helps him not blow one out of every seven ball/strike calls.
Allowing bias and error to decide the course of a sporting event when there are available alternatives is stupid. It defies the entire point of the competition, which is to determine which is the better baseball team, not which will get a favourable break from an umpire’s incompetence.
I look into my crystal ball and see the future…Chris Sale unleashes a beauty of a curveball but the robot calls it a ball. To Sale’s thinking, this is the third consecutive bad call by the robot. Sale demands that the umpires fix or reboot the robot, then sits down on the mound in protest. The fans in Fenway don’t like this one bit, and they start throwing garbage on the field. The umpires huddle, a call is placed to MLB HQ…
Yah, no thanks.
Yeah, I have to agree with this. Screw the “human element” bullshit. I never watched the game for umpires, anyway.
The umpires start calling balls on the batter until Sale quits pouting. The problem will solve itself pretty quickly from there.
Seriously, this is like arguing that Olympic races should be timed using manually operating stopwatches.
It’s also like arguing that robots should run the olympic races.
Sports have an aesthetic. Take an idiot sport like football. Every thing is micro-managed into a retarded game that moves in three second increments. Why have referees at all? Surely the friendly jockos in the booth could dissect each play using thirty or forty replay clips and endless yacking to determine whether the ball “broke the plane” or not. Isn’t that what sports is all about?
You know, football has this marvelous new technology by which the referee is given multiple slow-motion views of the play, precisely so that he can correctly determine whether the ball crossed the goal line. And that hasn’t hurt the sport’s ratings at all.
In any case, that’s a non-sequitur, as the ball and strike calling mechanism is instantaneous. Watching a baseball broadcast here in Canada on Sportsnet, I can see the results of PitchFX and it displays the exact location that the pitch crossed the plane of the home plate, often faster than the umpire can signal ball or strike.
I have to wonder that if American networks did the same as Sportsnet and viewers in the US could see how incompetent MLB umpires are at calling balls and strikes if resistance to having the computer would be the same?
This is so breathtakingly silly I didn’t know how to respond at first. Nobody – fucking nobody – watching baseball to see those fucking primadonnas in blue. If you don’t believe that, try comparing an umpire’s salary to the salary of the most useless bench player in the major leagues. Nobody gives a shit if Jim Joyce umpires a game or not, which is reflected in his pay.
Hey, umpires make mistakes. So do infielders. Why should we tolerate that? We could have simulated players in a virtual space who never bobble the ball.
It’s not about the umpires, it’s about the idiotic quest for perfection. It’s clearly progressive, so why stop there when so many other imperfections could be eliminated using technology?
There are times when I don’t want the umpire to be perfect. That three and two that was less than an inch off the plate? Fuck 'em, should have swung.
Yeah, no. We don’t need shit like this in the MLB. It doesn’t make the game “better” in any way. And I don’t understand the player vs umpire error analogy at all.
Meh. I can live with one out of a million calls being pretty bad.
In other news, Clayton Kershaw just became the first pitcher in history (or at least since the mound was set at its current distance from home plate) to record 150 strikeouts before giving up 10 walks in a season.
Players’ mistakes are a desirable–in fact necessary–part of the game. It’s signal. Umpire mistakes are noise.
If it only were one out of a million. Try more like one out of eight to ten balls and strike calls. The Galarraga perfect game call is another one. At least they fixed it with replay since then. I just don’t see how human error regarding judgment calls regarding the actual rules of the game makes the game any better.
I don’t see a problem that needs fixing, is all. People have been crying about umpires since the nineteenth century…it’s part of the game. It all evens out in the end.
I don’t believe this is necessarily true. But even if it were, I don’t like it. I don’t want my experience of the game obscured by a haze of inaccuracy, even an even one. ‘Noise’ in the on-field regulation of play is no more desirable than static in a broadcast presentation of it. Given that we have the technological ability to do better, we should. I want high-definition baseball.
The Yankees are 10 games over .500 and 1 game back in the wild card chase. 66-48 since starting the season 9-17. Unfortunately, the rest of their schedule is brutal. This might be their peak, but hey, it’s exciting baseball in September.
In the Giant’s 12-inning 7-6 victory over Arizona last night (necessitated by Bruce Bochy’s ridiculous decision to bring Santiago Casilla in to close in the 10th despite his promise that he wouldn’t do that any more), Arizona used 26 players, including 12 pitchers. Giants used 20 players, including eight pitchers. In the 12th, the Giants brought in Cory Gearrin to pitch, then moved him to left field while they brought in Javier Lopez to face one batter, then brought Gearrin back in from left to pitch to close out the game.