{"id":544709,"date":"2026-03-18T14:56:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T14:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/544709\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T14:56:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T14:56:07","slug":"ai-on-deck-assessing-impact-of-mlbs-new-ball-strike-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/544709\/","title":{"rendered":"AI on deck: assessing impact of MLB\u2019s new ball-strike system"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAmbiguity is core to MLB and to the idea of what makes a good game and a good experience,\u201d said Kamino, who\u2019s published research on\u00a0social robots<\/a> and\u00a0the bonds robot owners form with them and each other<\/a>. \u201cThe strike zone is ambiguous. It\u2019s a social construct. How do you even automate that?\u201d<\/p>\n

That question struck Kamino two years ago after checking in on her favorite player, Shohei Ohtani, the otherworldly pitcher-slugger for the Los Angeles Dodgers. With the Dodgers game on, she heard the broadcasters discussing the impending rollout of \u201crobot cameras.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should study this,\u201d Kamino texted to fellow information science doctoral student and collaborator, Andrea Wen-Yi Wang, whose research explores the use of AI systems to automate unclear definitions and concepts.<\/p>\n

Then, Kamino took a big swing. She and Wang cold-emailed MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred \u201980 and made a pitch to the Cornell ILR School graduate: Kamino and her co-researchers wanted to study the ABS to find out how a massive organization with so many stakeholders was implementing and making sense of an AI tool.<\/p>\n

Manfred responded within 30 minutes and gave the green light. That eventually led to on-field research work last summer, when Kamino and Wang attended ABS-enabled spring training games in Arizona, umpire training camps and a baseball analytics conference.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIntroducing technology into baseball isn\u2019t like bringing a robot into a manufacturing line,\u201d said\u00a0Malte Jung<\/a>, associate professor of information science, the Nancy H. \u201962 and Philip M. \u201962 Young Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, and Kamino\u2019s adviser and research collaborator. \u201cYou\u2019re bringing technology into a game that has a culture and a history, with an audience in the millions. As researchers, what was compelling to us was the opportunity to study human-machine interaction in the wild at a scale we never considered.\u201d<\/p>\n

All-star Mookie Betts, of the Los Angeles Dodgers, takes an at bat during Spring Training.<\/p>\n

Implementing automated enforcement systems like the ABS into existing organizations requires complex consensus-building and sense-making among stakeholders, researchers found. After seven years of development and testing, the ABS appears ready for \u201cThe Show,\u201d and that\u2019s a credit to MLB\u2019s careful rollout and willingness to adapt the system based on feedback, researchers added.<\/p>\n

These findings were outlined in \u201cBeyond Accuracy: Rethinking the Value of AI in Decision-Making Through Baseball\u2019s Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) System<\/a>,\u201d which Kamino presented at the Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS) on Jan. 7. The paper is authored by Kamino, Wang, Selma Sabanovic, professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at Indiana University, and Jung.<\/p>\n

In its newest ABS-related paper, \u201cWhat is a Robot? Understanding Baseball\u2019s \u2018Robot Umpire\u2019 Through the Lens of Fluid Technology,\u201d Cornell researchers investigate why some fans and media call ABS a \u201crobot umpire\u201d in the first place. After all, it\u2019s an inconspicuous camera system with no typical robotic features.<\/p>\n

They argue that robots are better understood as \u201cfluid, sociotechnical assemblages\u201d rather than fixed hunks of hardware and software. Robots are adapted and shaped by the communities they serve, researchers said. The paper will be presented at the 21st annual Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers \/Association for Computing Machinery\u2019s International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, held March 16-19 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The paper is authored by Kamino, Wang,\u00a0Guy Hoffman<\/a>, associate professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Sabanovic, and Jung.<\/p>\n

Wang is the lead author of a third related paper, currently under peer review, showing that enforcement technologies like the ABS don\u2019t simply enforce rules, but shape the rules. In the ABS\u2019 case, it translates and thus redefines the strike zone from an imaginary 3D prism hovering above home plate into 2D, making it more readable for the ABS technology and viewer-friendly for visual presentation on broadcasts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cParadoxically, the ABS was brought in to enforce the rules, but it also changed the rules so that it would be accepted by multiple stakeholder groups,\u201d Wang said. \u201cThis bidirectional relationship between enforcement technology and the rules is less talked about and reveals why we need to study technology from a system\u2019s lens.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Additionally, the use of ABS confirms what most baseball fans know but choose not to admit, researchers said.<\/p>\n

\u201cUmpires,\u201d Kamino said, \u201care very good at their jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0Louis DiPietro is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAmbiguity is core to MLB and to the idea of what makes a good game and a good…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":["post-544709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}