{"id":544388,"date":"2026-03-25T13:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T13:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/544388\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T13:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T13:19:08","slug":"baseballs-new-robot-umpires-look-like-a-compromise-theyre-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/544388\/","title":{"rendered":"Baseball\u2019s new robot umpires look like a compromise. They\u2019re not."},"content":{"rendered":"

For a sport that\u2019s more than 150 years old<\/a>, the opening of the 2026 Major League Baseball season is set to feature an unusual number of firsts. The official Opening Day on March 26 is the earliest in baseball history<\/a>. The first official game of the season tonight between the Giants and the Yankees \u2014 which is Opening Night, not Opening Day, totally different \u2014 will be the first-ever game streamed on Netflix<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And chances are that some time during that game, a player will tap his helmet or hat after a pitch is thrown, challenging the umpire\u2019s call and triggering baseball\u2019s first-ever Automated Balls and Strikes (ABS) system review<\/a>. The robot umpires are here.<\/p>\n

The system is remarkably straightforward. Each team gets two challenges per game, retaining them if successful, losing them if wrong. Only the pitcher, catcher, or batter can challenge, only over balls and strikes calls, and only within two seconds of the pitch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Once a challenge is made, a network of 12 high-speed cameras<\/a> installed around the stadium tracks the pitch\u2019s exact location, and then software creates a 3D model of the pitch\u2019s trajectory \u2014 on the Jumbotron for everyone to see \u2014 against the batter\u2019s individualized strike zone. The verdict is made instantly. The umpire doesn\u2019t go to a monitor and reconsider for minutes, like in NFL or NBA replay. He is merely the conduit to announce what the machine has decided.<\/p>\n

This change should in theory make everyone better off. Teams have an appeal in the event of a potential blown call at a crucial moment (such as the brutal game-ending strike call<\/a> for the Dominican Republic in this month\u2019s World Baseball Classic). Challenges are limited and rapidly decided, so the game doesn\u2019t slow down. The automated system is accurate<\/a> to within 0.25 inches \u2014 roughly the width of a pencil \u2014 and quick enough to catch an Aroldis Chapman 103-mph fastball<\/a>. Human umpires are still largely in charge of the game.<\/p>\n

All in all, the ABS system appears to be an ideal compromise \u2014 preserving human judgement while allowing machines to correct the worst mistakes. While the system isn\u2019t AI-powered, it seems like an example of how humans and AI could fruitfully work together in the future, with humans firmly in the loop but aided by the machines.<\/p>\n

Except there\u2019s a problem with splitting the difference between human and machine. Once you\u2019ve conceded that the machine is the final authority on whether a call is right \u2014 which is exactly what baseball has done here \u2014 you\u2019ve quietly eliminated the case for having the human there at all. What might seem like a stable equilibrium isn\u2019t stable at all.<\/p>\n

Calling balls and strikes<\/p>\n

You can see this breakdown already underway in the minor leagues, which has been experimenting<\/a> with the ABS system for years. Baseball reporter Jayson Stark has written<\/a> about umpires in the AAA minors who, having grown tired of being overturned for all to see by the machine, began to change the way they handled the game, \u201ccalling balls and strikes the way they think the robot would call them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because the league has given the machine final say, the human behind the mask doesn\u2019t stay independent \u2014 he starts mimicking the machine. The umpire \u2014 once the lord of the diamond, whose word was law \u2014 becomes in effect the rough draft for the AI. Human knowledge and expertise becomes degraded.<\/p>\n

To which a baseball fan might respond, perhaps with more colorful language, \u201cthey\u2019re all bums anyway.\u201d Which wouldn\u2019t be quite fair to our carbon-based umpires, not that fairness to umps has ever been a concern for baseball fans. MLB estimates<\/a> that umpires call 94 percent of pitches correctly, which on one hand is good \u2014 I\u2019m not sure I\u2019m 94 percent accurate on anything \u2014 but on the other hand, means they\u2019re still making mistakes on around 17 or 18 pitches a game on average.<\/p>\n

And even though the data suggests umpires have actually been getting better, we\u2019re now able to see replays and precise pitch-tracking data that make it crystal clear just when a call has been blown. A guy named Ethan Singer even created an independent project called Umpire Scorecards<\/a>, which uses publicly available Statcast\/pitch tracking data<\/a> to score every umpire, every game. The new ABS system just ratifies what previous technology made obvious years ago.<\/p>\n

So the technological assault on the umpire\u2019s authority has been underway for some time, and while even the ABS system has its margin of error<\/a>, the end result of introducing machines will be a more accurately called game. But real human skills will be lost along the way. The best catchers are experts at framing pitches<\/a> to make them look like strikes, even if they aren\u2019t. Good batters learn an umpire\u2019s individual strike zone and adjust game to game. (The Red Sox great Ted Williams used to say<\/a> there were three strike zones: his own, the pitcher\u2019s, and the umpire\u2019s.) All of these skills were built on human imperfection, and all of them will become less valuable even as machines make the game \u201cfairer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The one-way street of automation<\/p>\n

To get a glimpse of baseball\u2019s possible future, just look at tennis.<\/p>\n

In 2006, pro tennis introduced the Hawk-Eye challenges<\/a>, which allowed players to appeal a limited number of line calls to an automated camera system. The players were, initially, not fans. (As Marat Safin put it<\/a>: \u201cWho was the genius who came up with this stupid idea?\u201d)<\/p>\n

But the logic, especially as the sport got faster and faster, was undeniable. By 2020, the US Open had eliminated human line judging altogether<\/a>, and Wimbledon followed suit in 2025<\/a>. Human umpires are still employed, but mostly for the purposes of match management; i.e., shushing the crowd. The challenge system turned out to be just a stop on the path to near full-scale automation. And now baseball is stepping onto the same road.<\/p>\n

The ABS system is what you get when an institution knows that the machine is better at the job but isn\u2019t ready to say so. That\u2019s exactly the position that a lot of organizations find themselves in right now, as AI grows ever more capable. The result, for the moment, tends to be a hybrid approach that leaves too many workers feeling stressed and disempowered, while failing to capture the benefits of more complete automation.<\/p>\n

But over time, automation tends to prove to be a one-way street. The question isn\u2019t whether machines will eventually call balls and strikes. It\u2019s how much longer the halfway point can hold \u2014 for those umpires we love to hate, and for the rest of us.<\/p>\n

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect<\/a> newsletter. Sign up here!<\/a><\/p>\n

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Swati Sharma<\/p>\n

Vox Editor-in-Chief<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a sport that\u2019s more than 150 years old, the opening of the 2026 Major League Baseball season…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544389,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[181,690,29584,4530,363,99,74],"class_list":["post-544388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-culture","tag-future-perfect","tag-innovation","tag-mlb","tag-sports","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}