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CLEARWATER, Fla. — Do you miss those robots yet?
We’ve spent the past five weeks watching them pop out of hiding, every time a catcher, hitter or pitcher tapped his head to ask his favorite robot umpires: “Where the heck was that pitch?”
Then, almost instantaneously, a six-second animation would roll on the ballpark videoboard — and baseball’s spring training experiment with the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) challenge system would work its magic.
So now that it’s time to send those robots back from whence they came — namely, the minor leagues — as spring training fades into the rearview mirror, how’d that experiment go? That’s what we’re here to tell you, because over the past month, we’ve pretty much seen it all.
We’ve seen walks turn into strikeouts.
We’ve seen strikeouts turn into walks.
We’ve seen strikeouts turn into home runs.
We’ve seen fans boo those poor, well-meaning robots.
And in the midst of it all, Alex Cora revealed his worst robotic nightmare.
“My first thought was, like: Bases loaded … 3-2 count … ninth inning in the World Series … tie game,” said the Red Sox manager this spring, shaking his head. “Yeah! Ball four! That’s where my mind went. And I was, like: Oh, shoot!”
OK, don’t shoot. This was only a test. No World Series games were played this spring. It was only spring training, with an electronic ball-strike challenge system running in baseball’s test lab. It was all just for feedback purposes. We won’t see this technology in real games before next year at the earliest — and probably longer.
But that scene in Cora’s brain could happen someday, if — OK, let’s say when — this challenge system gets unleashed in games that count. So is that what we want? Is that what baseball wants? We’ll discuss those questions shortly.
Technology is a beautiful thing. It’s changed the game. It’s changed the way we watch the game. And both changes, respectively, are still unfolding.
The data suggests that the use of robot umpires could reduce the number of disputes and improve the accuracy of calls. But is that really the goal of the sport? Is that what makes the game better? And what about the anticipation, the drama, the debate? Does automated strike zones reduce those things, or do they enhance them?
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