Upstream,<\/i><\/a>\u00a0The Daily Wire\u2019s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories \u2014 from our featured writers to you.<\/i><\/p>\n***<\/i><\/p>\n
One of the most important moments in baseball history occurred on Saturday, in the 6<\/span>th<\/span> inning of a closely contested but otherwise ordinary early-season game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWith two outs and the bases loaded, with the Reds up 5-3, C.B. Bucknor, one of the worst home-plate umpires in Major League Baseball, rung up Reds third baseman Eugenio Suarez on a called strike three. Suarez immediately tapped his helmet, indicating he was disputing the call. This activated the computerized ABS, Automated Balls and Strikes system, which the MLB is officially implementing this year after several years of trial and error.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nTV viewers immediately saw the pitch, as did people in the Reds home stadium. The computer animation showed that Bucknor was wrong. It was a ball. The crowd roared. Any true baseball fan \u2014 and the Reds have a passionate and well-informed fan base \u2014 knows that Bucknor has long been a problem for the sport, an out-of-control, marginally-competent egomaniac who often gets calls wrong in key situations, imposing his will, deciding games in inappropriate situations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOn the very next pitch, Bucknor rung up Suarez again. Again, Suarez challenged, and <\/span>again<\/span><\/i>, Bucknor was wrong. It was a ball. The stadium reacted like the Reds had just won the World Series. The Reds announcers remarked that it was the loudest cheer on a day where the Reds had already hit two home runs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOn the next pitch after that, Suarez grounded out to end the inning. But even though the Reds ended up walking off the game in the 11<\/span>th<\/span> with a single, winning a 6-5 thriller, the real headline was the gauntlet that this new technology laid down to the home-plate umpire\u2019s authority. The Red Sox and Reds challenged Bucknor eight times. And they were right six of those times. Tensions boiled over so extremely that Bucknor ended up ejecting Red Sox manager Alex Cora in the eighth inning. But that was the desperate act of exactly the type of professionally doomed person that the ABS means to expose. The game will never be the same.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOne of baseball\u2019s most beautiful features is that it\u2019s always changing. It used to take nine balls to draw a walk. Black players had a separate league. There were no night games. People rooted for players with names like \u201cDizzy\u201d and \u201cDazzy\u201d and \u201cMoose.\u201d And the game today, though basically the same as the one I knew as a kid, also has some significant differences. The Houston Astros used to be in the National League. The Milwaukee Brewers were in the American League. There were no Wild Card teams until 1995. There were no divisions until 1969. The introduction of in-season interleague play seemed like a dumb idea, and it remains a dumb idea, but there\u2019s absolutely nothing we can do about it now. When the MLB added the designated hitter to the National League, it was a violation of all that\u2019s holy. But that was before Shohei Ohtani signed with my beloved Dodgers. Now I like the DH.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThere was also a time when we couldn\u2019t even conceive of robot umps, except on an episode of Futurama, but now they feel like they\u2019ve always been inevitable. Fans used to have a lot of fun when fat old managers roared out of the dugout to scream at fat old umpires over ball-strike calls. But that was decades ago, when the calls were guesswork for everyone involved, fans, players, managers, and umpires alike. After TV broadcasts introduced pitch-tracking technology in 2008 and StatCast in 2015, suddenly everyone could see exactly what the umps were getting wrong. The era of \u201cYER BLIND, UMP!\u201d ended. It stopped being amusing and started just feeling pathetic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMLB first tried out the ABS system in the minor leagues and then last season in Spring Training. The system uses 12 Hawk-Eye cameras and T-Mobile\u2019s 5G network to track pitches within one-sixth of an inch of accuracy. It takes the guesswork out of the way, removing the last major bone of contention that teams have with umpires.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIf a pitcher, catcher, or batter thinks an umpire has missed a strike call, they can \u201cchallenge.\u201d This triggers an automatic robot review. If the challenger is right, the call is overturned. But the challenger can also be wrong, which allows the game to retain an element of human error. From Thursday through Sunday, roughly 54% of all challenged calls were overturned, which means that players were right slightly more often than umpires.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nUmpires <\/span>are<\/span><\/i> often right, but the bad ones can no longer take charge of a game behind the plate through bad calls, briefly becoming the main character when the focus should be on the players. Also, the ABS mostly gets rid of \u201cpitch-framing,\u201d a sub-skill among certain catchers where they can micro-jerk their mitts into the strike zone, sleight-of-hand fooling umpires into making the wrong call. It\u2019s going to get a lot harder for catchers to pull a rabbit out of that hat, just like it\u2019s going to get a lot harder for batters to throw temper tantrums when they think the umpire has done them dirty. The rational ABS will quickly dump ice water on those hotheads.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMost importantly, it will be a lot harder for a missed ball-strike call to determine a game\u2019s outcome. We saw perhaps the last instance of this in modern history in the 9<\/span>th<\/span> inning of the World Baseball Classic semifinal between the USA and the Dominican Republic. The WBC didn\u2019t use the ABS, and it sure showed. With the 2-1 game on the line and a runner on third with a three-ball and two-strike count, U.S. pitcher Mason Miller threw a low slider to the DR\u2019s Geraldo Perdomo. It was clearly a ball. Perdomo didn\u2019t swing. Umpire Cory Blaser called it a strike anyway, and that was ballgame.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nCory Blaser may be the last umpire ever to crush a national fan base\u2019s dreams. The ABS cannot make a mistake like that. It sees all.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOver the weekend, the Baltimore Orioles successfully challenged two separate pitches in the 9th inning against the Minnesota Twins, turning a potential walk into a strikeout to nail down an 8-6 win. We\u2019ve yet to see a dramatic game-ending ABS overturn, but it\u2019s coming, and the stadium will go nuts like a stadium has never gone nuts before. Because the robot umps are here to save baseball.<\/span><\/p>\n***<\/p>\n
Neal Pollack, \u201cthe greatest living American writer,\u201d is the author of 12 semi-bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction and is a three-time \u201cJeopardy!\u201d champion.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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