The commissioner of Major League Baseball (MLB), Rob Manfred, announced on Wednesday that he would introduce a proposal to the sport's competition committee that would bring the automated ball-strike system (ABS) to MLB in 2026.
Since the 11-person competition committee is mostly made up of hand-picked stooges of the commissioner, the proposal is almost certain to pass.
The use of ABS would be limited to two challenges by coaches of ball-strike calls.
"Each team receives two challenges that would turn to the electronic zone to potentially overrule a call the team feels is incorrect. Challenges must be called for in real time by either the hitter, catcher or pitcher. An overturned call does not result in a forfeited challenge," writes MLB Trade Rumors.
The limited number of challenges is to prevent players from overchallenging and slowing down the game.
The system was tested this year in spring training and is being tried out in Triple A ball in calling all balls and strikes. The decision to go full ABS won't happen immediately. But I'm putting purists and traditionalists like me on notice -- it's coming.
Will taking the human element out of the game destroy its character? It's not just ABS; there's a system being developed in the minor leagues right now that would use "bat-tracking metrics" to call check swings.
“We haven’t made a decision about the check-swing thing. … I think we got to get over the hump in terms of either doing ABS or not doing it before you’d get into the complication of a separate kind of challenge involved in an at-bat, right,” Manfred tells Evan Drellich of The Athletic. “You think about them, they’re two different systems operating at the same time. We really got to think that one through.”
Taking the individual idiosyncrasies of the umpire out of the equation will make the game more sterile. Do umpires call pitched balls differently if the count is 0-2 or 3-1? Of course they do. When the difference between a ball and a strike is a few inches, giving and taking by an umpire is part of the charm of the game.
Also, star pitchers get all kinds of called strikes that a callup from the minors would never get. That's been the way baseball has been played since forever, and changing it by giving the job to robots destroys something valuable, something traditional that shouldn't be lost. Conversely, star hitters get breaks on pitches that may or may not have been strikes, or check swings that weren't checked.
Unfair? Giving the benefit of the doubt in real time, remember, to proven pitchers and hitters is part of the game.
The reason for these automated systems? Gambling. The American Gaming Association (AGA) estimates that MLB stands to gain $1.1 billion in projected revenue from legal sports betting. Serious money being poured into legalized gambling means that bettors and casino owners couldn't give a fig about tradition or the charm of the game. They want no controversy when it comes to balls, strikes, outs, safe calls, check swings, or any other play of the game that upsets the oddsmakers.
But controversy is what made baseball the national pastime in the early to late 20th century. It involved the ordinary fan in the games as no other marketing device ever could. It's not the same now that there are online forums. In the Golden Age of Baseball (1945-1980), screaming matches on street corners or over backyard fences were not uncommon, enriching people's love of the game in ways that are hard to fathom for those who didn't experience it firsthand.
Baseball nourished the community. Big cities were mesmerized by their team's success or failure. There is no such uniting expedient today as there was when players were gods and the game was king.
So perhaps robots are the perfect metaphor for today's stale, sterile game of Major League Baseball. Devoid of controversy except for gossip about who is sleeping with whom or who said what about Trump, the game will continue into the rest of the 21st century until artificial life forms replace players. Or perhaps the entire game will be played in our mind by AI-generated fantasies.
Something unique and American is being lost with this move to automation. I'm very happy I won't be around to see how it all turns out.
