it's wild to me that
- in baseball, half of the umpires job is to call strikes
- as far as i can tell, it's agreed upon that they fuck this up all the time
- it's incredibly hard for a human to do
- it's one of the very few tasks that a computer is actually good at
- there's no other sport where computer analysis could add any value. cameras can't keep track of hockey pucks or footballs, and a lot of other sports don't have the level of precision of baseball pitching
- baseball is the only sport where a camera has an absolutely unfettered view of the ball on 100% of plays
- they've already built computer systems to analyze pitches
- they've been completely universal and reliable for over a decade
- they still make it an umpire's call
it's just so bizarre. there's no value in this being a human decision, there's no "analog warmth" element to an umpire staring into the audience and daydreaming during a pitch and getting the call wrong. it's not like there's a judgment call to be made. it's a literal, scientific question of where the ball was, and nobody could come up with a good reason that answering that precisely on every single pitch with electronics would be a bad thing, that somehow makes the game less human.
i saw some shit saying that players would still argue with the "computerized ump" and i'm like, okay, right now they have an excuse, because the umps are sometimes wrong. whereas, if you want to argue with a machine that's provably 100% accurate... i mean, hell, you can't get thrown out for it, so it would actually make some games run smoother! sure, go bounce your helmet off the LCD screen. nobody cares. there's acrylic over it. i'm making the hand signal for time, get it all out
this is one of the very few cases where I think it's absurd to not use a computer. we only use them for shit they're like 15% good at, and then we pretend they're 100% accurate. this is a case where 100% accuracy is actually possible! we have sixty years of military R&D behind this, and it's just not a very hard thing to do! people write code that does this on a weekend, for fun, and it works!
apparently computerized calls might be coming in the next couple years, maybe, but there's no reason it should be this late. it doesn't even require computers, they could have solved it in the 50s with Electronic Eyes on either side of the plate and left only the altitude vs. height question up to the umpire. absolutely inexplicable
footnote: i do not actually care viscerally about any of this, i am just confused
as somebody who loves baseball and has thought about this a lot, here are a few points that i think cohere into my pretty pro-umpire position.
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prelude: if you believe a priori that there's no sense of 'analog warmth' in this specific dynamic, in baseball, or even sports in general, that's fine, but my tastes differ. sports to me are about humans doing cool stuff and the narratives that fall out of humans being placed in deliberately fanciful situation. they're about all the amazing stuff, cool stuff bad stuff, stupid stuff, human stuff that humans do, not about particular abstract conditions being fulfilled or not, in my mind.
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there are plenty of other rules across sports that i find to be qualitatively comparable in intent to the concept of the strike zone (that being, 1) the pitcher is supposed to throw the ball to the batter in a manner where it could theoretically be hit, and 2) the hitter is supposed to try and swing at a ball that can be theoretically hit in turn. this is, philosophically, an imperfect, generalized, but common-sense metric to facilitate play in which people see good pitcher-batter matchups, the core gameplay loop and the heart of the sport.
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there's a rule in basketball called the three-second rule: to be brief, defending players are not allowed to stay in the paint, a region around the hoop, for more than three seconds. the intent of this rule is, of course, to facilitate play in which people see good offense-defense matchups, because otherwise the defense could just sit under the hoop and there's no game to be played. this rule is not, and has literally never been to my understanding in the modern game, enforced as written, and nobody in the universe would want it to be, even though it could be tracked by a computer. borderline violations would completely disrupt the rhythm of play, and put a hard wall on what i think is the value of human officials, in that they are human. the one difference that makes the three-second rule more egregious if computer-mediated would be that basketball has a time clock, while baseball has an out clock, and fouls necessitate an interruption in normal play, while in baseball each PA ends in an advancement in play of some kind, with no time-outs to speak of.
the point being, no one cares about the three-second rule being enforced because it is successful in what incentives are created, regardless of whether it is legalistically violated as a matter of course or not. i would argue that's largely also true with the strike zone.
- that argument, combined with the fact that umpire accuracy and consistency is actually pretty high compared to what a lot of people think (and absolutely compared to what it used to be) is why the human strike zone works, but i even think it's good on top of that. because it adds depth to the game. the batters and pitchers learning the particular nuance of the "enforced strike zone" that night is a genuine skill that is generally interesting to observe, but that pales in comparison to its specific distillate in catcher framing. yes, framing is lying to umpires, but lying is fun and cool, and the contrasts in this skill which is somewhat unrelated to the other skills make for a good catcher (though not totally, deception is useful for, say, put-out attempts mid-PA, though with the pitch clock that's going to go down) make for deeply fascinating strategic considerations when balancing your catching tandem and considering individual matchups. a huge dimension of the catching profession that has built up over time would largely disappear, and i think that's a bummer. again, i really can't make an argument if you think it sucks, but that's true with anything about sports.
also, running out of steam here but this is arguably the most important, but simplest point: i'm pro labor and i like to see people make money, and almost every anti-umpire argument online is mum at best to the question as to how exactly the back of their union should be broken, or why it's inherently okay to remove these jobs from existence unilaterally.
This makes me think of another phenomenon in basketball: flopping. I am resolutely pro-flopping. I think flopping is funny and cool. I think Marcus Smart and Kyle Lowry are both entertaining and great basketball players.
Specifically, I think that the charge rule adds a lot of dimension and texture to basketball that wouldn't be there otherwise, and applying the charge rule in ways that favor habitual floppers like Kyle Lowry (Seen here trying to get a charge called on LeBron James in the all-star game) is cool and fun. So much of modern basketball is about matchup hunting; the charge rule means that bigs who are switched onto a guard can't just automatically back them up in the post for a layup, and that transition attempts can be meaningfully defended even when there's a big numbers disadvantage.
The flipside of the charge is that it also incentivizes defenders to get in the way of driving dunkers, which leads to more posters. Everyone goes home happy!
Flopping on offense leads to more bad shot attempts, which makes the game funnier and more chaotic, which are good things. Chris Paul having the option to try and extract two free throws from some mark by doing the rip thru leads to less possessions where the ball is just moving around the perimeter and the offense is just probing fruitlessly then settling for a mediocre shot.
Ultimately, pro sports need these unfair and random wrinkles to them because otherwise fandom would be very difficult. Imagine if instead of just tweeting "FUCK scott foster" you had to take a long hard look at the problems with your team's roster and coaching? God, perish the thought!
