The August 23 edition of The New Yorker features an interesting/disheartening article by Zach Helfand on the imminent (?) arrival of automated umpiring systems to call balls and strikes.
A telling quote from the story:
According to Sword, A.B.S. was part of a larger project to make baseball more exciting. Executives are terrified of losing younger fans and worry that the sport is at risk of becoming the next horse racing or boxing. “We started this process by asking ourselves and our fans, ‘What version of baseball do you love the most?’ ” he said. Everyone wanted more action: more hits, more defense, more baserunning. This style of baseball essentially hasn’t existed since the eighties. The “Moneyball” era and the hundred-mile-an-hour fastball, difficult to hit and to control, have flattened the game into strikeouts, walks, and home runs—actions lacking much action.
One of the takeaways — and I’ve heard this more and more watching games on TV — is how the strike zone is malleable, for lack of a better word. It depends not only on who’s behind the plate, but other situations like getaway games, the weather, and, unfortunately, who’s pitching or at bat; veteran players who behave themselves generally get the benefit of the doubt. As Hefland writes,
For many years, an umpire’s strike zone was like an extension of his personality. Some umpires were literalists, uncompromising. Some preferred expediency; their boundaries were enormous. No matter who was working, when it rained suddenly everything was a strike. West, the record-holding umpire, is a burly man with a Carolina drawl who moonlights as a country singer and used to pal around with Merle Haggard. He told me one umpire described the old standard for learning the strike zone as “You call them strikes until someone goes, ‘Hey!’ ”
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