It was only a matter of time. Major League Baseball announced on September 23 that next year’s regular season would see the introduction of robot umpires for balls and strikes, a system already in use in the minor leagues. The robots won’t call every pitch (at least, not for now), but teams will be allowed a set number of challenges to umpires’ calls per game, similar to the system now used for plays on the field.
This would appear to be a difficult rule change to argue against, even for baseball fans, a group that has always contained a vocal minority of extreme conservatives when it comes to the rules. Watching the broadcast of any baseball game, you can see a little box added in by broadcasters that shows the batter’s strike zone. And when each pitch is thrown, a little circular icon is added, showing where the pitch reached the plate. It is easy to see that occasionally (sometimes frequently), the little circular icon appears outside the box, signaling a ball—only for the umpire to call it a strike. That is exactly the kind of injustice that the new appeals system is meant to remedy.
But this easy inference rests on unexamined assumptions about the ontology of the strike zone—no, seriously—which, at as it currently exists, is a far more political concept than it appears at first blush.
It’s true that the rulebook is very clear on the subject:
The STRIKE ZONE is that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap.
But things don’t actually work exactly that way. As Brazilians like to say, na prática a teoria é outra: in practice, theory is something else. In this case, the reality is much more interesting than the theory. In practice, the strike zone varies from umpire to umpire, and sometimes from day to day even for a particular umpire. But it would be wrong to say that the strike zone is therefore arbitrary.
Announcers know the way that the game really works—they will often note, sometimes with an eyebrow slightly raised, that tonight, such-and-such umpire’s strike zone has “a lot of room on the outside,” meaning he is calling pitches on the outside of the plate as strikes. If you take a strictly rationalistic, objective approach to the strike zone, you would say that such an umpire is simply biased. But that would be wrong. The truth is that the strike zone has always been a subjectively constructed thing: it is where the umpire says it is.
Still, there are ground rules. If the umpire gives one team extra “room” on the outside of the zone, he must do the same for the other. If he does, then there’s no problem. It’s only if he gives one team the outside call, and denies the other the same, that players really get mad. The strike zone, therefore, is a political thing that ties the umpire to both teams, a zone measured more by a sense of fairness than by the distance from the top of the shoulders to the hollow beneath the kneecaps.
It's also something to which pitchers respond. They take note of where the umpire is and isn’t giving them calls. If he’s giving them the call on the outside corner, that’s where he’ll try to throw. If they’re not getting the call, they’ll stop trying. And if a pitcher gets one call on the outside, he might try to push his luck by trying to coax the umpire to give him calls further and further off the plate.
The catcher plays a role, too, “framing” balls just outside the zone by moving his glove into the zone as he catches the ball, in an effort to deceive the umpire. And the catcher is more closely tied to the umpire, more able to influence him, than the pitcher: catcher and umpire, after all, share a common situation, squatting side by side for hours, staring down 100-mile-an-hour fastballs that sometimes ricochet into one or the other of them with painful consequences.
It’s a delicate relational game: the umpire responds to the pitcher and catcher, the batter responds to the umpire—and it can all go wrong, batters and managers howling and swearing and throwing their gear around at a bad call that, in the last instance, may be nothing more than the result of an umpire carried along by the little maneuvers of a pitcher or a catcher who knows how to manipulate.
There’s more politics here: veteran pitchers are believed to sometimes “get” borderline calls from umpires that rookies don’t. This is one reason why Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Walker Buehler (a former World Series winner with the L.A. Dodgers), having experienced the new robot balls-and-strikes umpiring system while playing in the minor leagues earlier this year, says he hates it:
I think it’s inaccurate.… I think in most of the stadiums, it’s not even actually on the plate. I think it shifts certain directions in certain ballparks. I think the human element is a huge part of this game. I think starting pitchers that have pitched for a long time deserve certain parts of the plate that other guys don’t get.
The talents of the pitcher at manipulating that night’s “strike zone,” through clever tactics and through his own prestige, represent one way that he can get ahead of his competitors other than by the raw physical facts of how hard he throws, how much his pitches move, et cetera. If you think that baseball is a sport meant to measure the objective facts of one team’s physical abilities against another’s, then this sort of thing may seem bad to you. But if you view it as a battle of wills as well as of arms and legs, then this sort of thing should be preserved. It’s one of baseball’s distinctive pleasures to watch an aging pitcher, no longer able to overpower opponents by sheer velocity and movement, make ample use of his bag of tricks, including exploiting the ambiguities of the strike zone, to come out ahead of his rivals.
The strike zone, in short, is a tense, numinous zone of emotional contestation and supplication, not in any way reducible to the simple rectangle so misleadingly displayed on TV broadcasts. Except that soon, of course, it will be very much reducible to just that, with robot appeal-court judges standing ready to reject whatever human settlement has been reached between umpires, batters and pitchers in favor of the hard and simple rule of the box.
And in theory, that will, of course, bring us closer to what it says, after all, in the rulebook. Batters and pitchers will have their revenge against the umpires: his authority to expand or retract the zone will now be contingent rather than absolute. A baseball romantic might see the loss of the rich and complex interplay of the pre-robot strike zone as a miniature version of the great losses of modernity: the standardization of national languages, the replacement of artisan craftsmen with mass production, the mechanization of agriculture, and so on. As part of a drive to make the sport more popular over the past several years, the sport’s customary sedateness has been replaced with a faster, modern pace, thanks to a new pitch clock, and some quirks have been eliminated in a search for more highlight reels: Pitchers, for example, no longer bat in the National League, as they did when I was a teenager.
Like all these other changes, robot umpires happened for a reason—the unfairness of the bad call, the capriciousness of the umpire—and like all these changes it will create its own, different set of textured (perhaps less textured) norms, customs and recognizable stratagems in its wake. When to appeal, when not to? How to prevent players—who will seem to have the authority themselves, rather than the managers, to invoke the robot appeal—from challenging rashly? Will the robots have their own, different liabilities to error, not subject to emotional appeal or caprice but equally exploitable by a savvy player? Buehler seems to believe they will, and he would know.
Fairness and exhaustiveness in the application of justice generally comes at the cost of speed, and this may be the worst part of the change: an interruption to an at-bat while we wait for the robots to have their robotic say. Soccer fans often find VAR review a tedious and energy-draining affair (unless, of course, it vindicates them), and baseball already has tedious pauses when, since a rule change a few years ago, calls on the field are appealed, interminably, for review—“by New York,” as the announcers invariably describe it, a synecdoche for the technical HQ that reminds us that city still retains, in this narrow, literal sense at least, its status as cultural arbiter.
One pities the umpires who, with this MLB ukase, are demoted from petty tyrants of the infield diamond to mere functionaries, their rulings now merely provisional. Why have them at all, if the robots have the ultimate say? For the finer points of the game, one assumes: for balks, those subtle things; for deciding if the batter “went around” (another matter of taste); and, most importantly, for deciding how much backtalk, from a disgruntled player or manager, is sufficient to throw him out of the game. Sovereign is he who decides upon the exception.
But in the final analysis, the search for justice in sports—one which leads us ever deeper into combining technology with a simulacrum of law—seems to be a kind of category error. Baseball is not murder: It’s no great outrage if a batter strikes out when he should have walked. The batter might be mad, but he can cry all the way to the bank.
Little injustices like that give fans something to complain about, something to blame instead of their own team’s insufficiency in the event of a loss. No one wants to watch a film where everyone gets exactly what they deserve. Baseball is supposed to have a tragic element—it’s supposed to break your heart. It’s a play, of a kind, a simulacrum of life, with the injustice of the umpires standing in for the injustice of the world. Yet by that same token, perhaps the rule change simply updates the staging for our new circumstances. Appealing to the inhuman justice of the robot, the human creation unresponsive to human appeal: It’s the sort of thing we’ll all have to get used to doing.