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
...what if you could simply eliminate the concept of a strike zone altogether, and still get a playable game. you might get very entertaining attempts to throw barely-hittable pitches that run up against the mischance of throwing a wild pitch. baseball might be more fun without ANY umpiring, human or electronic!
