“It ain’t nothin’ till I call it.” — Bill Klem, the most famous umpire in history
Piqued by what he thought was a bad call on a couple pitches during a New York Yankees game a few seasons ago, a friend posted a complaint about the home plate ump’s judgments. Why, he wondered quite reasonably, wouldn’t we use all available technology and camerawork to make sure we get balls and strikes right? Why let a single fallible human being decide?
Since then, I’ve been going over in my head this notion of “getting it right” in baseball — and why I, an unrepentant technophile and early adopter in many respects, find myself reacting from the gut against deploying technology to render any final judgment on a pitch’s location. Was I simply being a traditionalist, sitting crankily in my folding chair as I spin a get-off-my-lawn argument? Five miles! Uphill! Both ways! In the snow!
Maybe that’s a small part of it. But I think it runs deeper than that. And now that the shift to “robot umpires” calling balls and strikes may soon be at hand, at least in the minor leagues, the question feels more pressing as the first weekend of 2023’s spring-training games arrives.
I’m not a rabid sports guy overall, just an enduring baseball fan. I love the tradition of it all, sure, but I’m hardly an originalist. I appreciate change in the game and the way the drive for progress has helped baseball lurch forward, from the demise of the spitball to the rise of the batting helmet. Rules changes, like other changes, are part of life. No blocking the plate by catchers? Seems a reasonable compromise. Umpires with mics speaking to the crowd and the at-home audience? Some of the traditional mystique is lost, but much can be gained, too. The designated hitter? Meh. I miss watching pitchers hit (or, usually, not hit), but the impetus is certainly understandable.
The calling of balls and strikes, though, feels different, and changing that seems to reach into another realm. I have always found the game’s most appealing trait to be its unyielding notion of striving to squeeze perfection out of an imperfect physical world on countless microlevels all at once — more, I’d argue, than in any other sport.
Perfection itself is, obviously, unattainable. But the friction between reach and grasp that every moment of baseball offers is the calculus of enduring genius. Too many to count are the random elements that can pivot an at-bat, or a pitching performance, or an inning, or a game, or a season in an entirely different direction (cf Fred Merkle, New York Giants, 1908 and Fred Snodgrass, New York Giants, 1912; also Bill Buckner, Boston Red Sox, 1986).
That’s why even the most arcane of statistics can be so pivotal in baseball. It’s also why sabermetrics and analytics and Statcast data are crucial tools; together they represent human beings locked in slow-motion arguments with thousands of numbers, working to exploit the cold facts that are out there and use them to make proper judgment calls in the heat of the next moment.
But the principle of rising and falling on one’s own efforts — and, by extension, the fact that sometimes errors become a defining part of the game (literally, as their own stat) — is one of baseball’s best features.
It’s a game of almost scientific exactitude, yes, but it always skews toward handcrafted exactitude. The fact that something can, and usually does, go wrong because of human error is part of the genius of baseball. And to my frustrated friend’s point, the performances of umpires are included in that notion. Do I want accurate calls? Absolutely. But I also adore that potential for imperfection that always hangs over everything — not just as something incidental, to be tolerated, but as part of the bedrock of what baseball actually is. Fallibility. Point of view. Alchemy.
When the granddaddy of all baseball analysts, the historian and statistician Bill James, invented the term sabermetrics in 1980, he referred to it as “”the search for objective knowledge about baseball.” That is altogether fitting and proper. But finding objective knowledge is one thing; choosing how to act on it is another entirely.
Using technology to measure things (i.e. the wonderful and wise introduction of pitch speeds into the moment-to-moment experience of baseball) and observe them and learn from them is just fine. Deploying tech to override the best efforts and perceptions of humans, though, generally seems to me to mechanize, and overwrite, the glory of imperfection. You risk obliterating part of what makes baseball truly exceptional — that lingering probability that someone, somewhere, be it umpire or player or manager or fan, will screw up, and the outcome will change, and the universe (or at least those playing the game that day) will have to come up with a way to compensate.
That principle is part of the excitement, not just something we tolerate or something that should be technologized into standardization. It lies at the cork heart of the game, and it belongs right where it is.
“I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears,” said the American historian Shelby Foote, no small baseball fan himself. In baseball, as in life, screwing up and working harder to figure things out afterward — and doing better the next time — is part of the genius of the thing.
In fact, it may be the point of everything.
I'm torn between shouting at clouds and embracing some much-needed change if baseball is to remain relevant. I do like the idea of automatic balls and strikes, it seems to go complement the pitch clock and batter's box rules. But the change I am most excited about is ending the shift. While genius, it is what I blame for the game becoming a monotonous series of strikeouts punctuated by the occasional homer. Small ball is much more exciting than people remember and I think it'll return this year. Good piece!
Fans will cheer when their star player hits a home run, and jeer when their top reliever gives up the winning hit.
That’s exactly what they signed up for — to be the guys in those high-leverage situations.
But any umpire will tell you they’re happiest when nobody notices them, and I’d wager that they’re happiest when the right calls are made — whether by themselves or by a robot.