Dear Baseball, It's Time to Get Rid of Home Plate Umpires

I'm not a baseball fan, strictly speaking. Don't get me wrong, I love the sport, but I harbor subversive ideas that a real baseball fan, by definition, cannot hold. I am a heretic. Take my view of umpiring, for example. In my opinion, it is high time Major League Baseball turns the job of calling balls and strikes over to the machines.

Logistically, it could be done. Already, home plates have become epicenters of scientific observation; there are probably more gizmos fixed on any given professional diamond than there are observing all of the planets in our solar system. Those gizmos give baseball fans--the most stat-hungry in sports--a trove of data that makes traditional metrics seem as antiquated as baseball cards. Gurus these days are more interested in the speed of a pitcher's fastball, the spin rate of his curve, and the exit velocity of a batter's home run than ERAs and batting averages.

These wonders of modern technology should be revolutionizing how umpiring is done. Instead, they are highlighting how atrocious umpiring is and probably always has been.

A short history: Beginning in 1887, baseball has relied upon the relatively frail eyesight of human beings to determine whether a pitch has passed through an imaginary box known as a "strike zone" (before then, batters could tell pitchers to throw a high, low, or fair pitch). Since then, players and fans have been complaining. Arguments over balls and strikes and the feeling of being ripped off by a blown call have become as integral to the baseball spectacle as chewing tobacco and facial hair.

Although their job hasn't changed much, being a major league umpire is as difficult as ever. A 92-mph fastball, once considered fast, is in the air for a mere 446 milliseconds. Today's pitchers have shaved precious milliseconds off that figure by throwing 100-mph more frequently than ever. Home plate umpires are expected to judge a ball's position at such speeds with no physical reference whatsoever: just an imaginary strike zone suspended in air.

Now, Major League Baseball has technology that could instantaneously call balls and strikes with the precision and impartiality that only machines can offer. It seems like a no-brainer. "The sad thing is you have no clue what could be called a ball or a strike at any point," complained former big-leaguer Erik Byrnes. "Why do millions of people sitting at home get to know whether or not it was a ball or strike, yet the poor dude behind home plate is the one who’s left in the dark?"

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/gil-lebreton/article105378146.html#storylink=cpy

If you can't relate to the emotional sting that comes from losing a game due to a blown strike call, consider some hard data that prove how bad the best umpires in the world are at calling pitches. When Yale professor Dr. Toby Moskowitz analyzed nearly a million major league pitches, he found that umpires correctly called a ball or strike about 88% of the time. That might not sound bad, but for close pitches--those within two inches of the plate--the success rate dropped to 68.7%. That's not good, especially considering that the umpires would have scored 50% if they were completely guessing.

It gets worse. Not only do umpires regularly miss calls, but they are also susceptible to bias. According to research from Stanford University, umpires tend to adjust the strike zones to avoid sending runners to first base on a walk or to the dugout on a strikeout: their zones expand in three-ball counts and shrink in two-strike counts. Umpires are also reluctant to call two strikes in a row. And try as they might, umps can't quite shake home-field bias: statistics show that home pitchers benefit from slightly more generous strike zones.

So if umpires are judged for both accuracy and consistency, then they are failing on both fronts.

Yet letting machines become umpires doesn't sit right with old-school baseball fans. To them, baseball just wouldn't be baseball without umps to flamboyantly ring-'em-up after a called third (alleged) strike. The "human element"--i.e., blown calls and the saliva-swapping arguments that ensue--are baseball's patina.

They have a point. After all, bad umpires have driven the plot of some of baseball's most memorable dramas: think Jackie Robinson magically stealing home through the tag of Yogi Bera in game 1 of the 1955 World Series, or George Brett flailing out of the dugout after Yankees manager Billy Martin complained about the pine tar on his bat and umpires negated his go-ahead home run. And who can forget Jim Joyce wiping tears away as he accepted a lineup card from Armando Galarraga a day after the umpire blew an  easy call that cost Galarraga a perfect game?

But baseball should not let infatuation with its history slow its progress. In pitch-tracking technology, the MLB has a near-perfect solution to a century-old problem. If such things were possible, the NBA would leap at the chance to remove the subjectivity from foul-calling. The NFL would pay handsomely to get rid of its five-minute replay delays. For now, basketball and football are stuck with their officiating woes. Baseball is not. Automated pitch calling would give officiating the precision and objectivity of replay review without the snooze-inducing delays.

I'm not saying mechanical pitch-calling won't change the game. It would, and drastically. Pitchers and batters who master the strike zone will become more valuable as their skill is more consistently rewarded. Catchers, freed from the charade of framing pitches, would change their catching stances to hold runners more aggressively. Even the aesthetics would change. Without a home plate umpire crowding the action, baseball games would take on a more backyard feel. That mano-y-mano medieval joust that is the pitcher-batter face-off would look better unsupervised.

Alas, baseball purists have a love-hate relationship with umpires that they aren't quite ready to quit. As much as they pester umpires through their TV screens, fans have developed a vocabulary for shrugging off their mediocrity. When a player resists the urge to swing at an outside pitch and gets called out on strikes the blame falls on him for not anticipating a blown call ("that was close enough to swing at with two strikes," "he's got to protect.") On a bad day, an umpire might still earn the praise of fans if he is "calling it both ways." That phrase sounds like a compliment. In fact, it is just a euphemism for, "well, at least both teams are getting equally ripped off."

"It's a part of the game," is my least favorite argument for tolerating bad umpiring. Before pitch-tracking technology, blown calls were tolerable--fans had no choice but to tolerate them. Now, they are an embarrassment.

I get it. After baseball replaces them, I will probably miss the human element that home plate umpires offer. (Likewise, after scientists cure the common cold, I may feel a certain nostalgia for the taste of cough syrup.) But the sport will fare better when its games hinge more on athletic feats and less on the foibles of its officials.
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Further Reading:

A summary of HBO's feature, Man vs. Machine can be seen here. Apparently former umpire Jerry Crawford laughed off any suggestion that things needed to change. Umpires have gotten so good, he claimed, that "they're not missing any pitches."

Here is an article for those interested in the history of pitching rules.

For Another Perspective:

Derek Thompson, writing for The Atlantic has argued that pitch trackers have made baseball worse by making it harder to score. The 2017 season--which set an all-time record for home runs--may have wrecked his theory.