On opening day last week, amid the sounds of bat on ball and the crunch of Cracker Jack, a death knell could be heard reverberating around baseball stadiums: A.I. was coming for the umpires.
Why? Because human umpires are capable of error, and in professional sports, errors can mean the difference between winning and losing. So professional sports teams and athletes have been increasingly interested in automated referees that make no mistakes.
This technology has been most effectively implemented in tennis, which, for nearly 20 years, has utilized Hawk-Eye technology—a band of high-speed cameras abetted, more recently, by A.I.—to judge whether balls are in or out.
But, as with all automation, there has been a human cost. Following the arrival of Hawk-Eye, humans started losing their jobs. This year, Wimbledon will have no line judges for the first time in its 147-year history.
In 2019, Major League Baseball first began experimenting with similar technology for the purpose of calling balls and strikes. Like HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, baseball’s robot umpire even got a sinister three-letter acronym: A.B.S., short for Automated Ball-Strike System. Every call would be made by A.B.S., and the results transmitted to earpieces worn by umpires standing behind home plate, who then announced them, effectively turning them into glorified computer speakers.
There were kinks at first. Dale Scott, who umpired professionally for 31 years and is now a rules analyst for MLB Network, remembers that when A.B.S. was first implemented in the Atlantic League (an independent professional league affiliated with the M.L.B.), it “just wasn’t working.” The strike zone gauged by the new technology couldn’t keep up with the ever changing variables—such as the batter’s height and stance—as well as human umpires could. “There’s a science and an art to umpiring,” Scott says.
Following improvements, after which A.B.S. became able to perfectly track a ball’s flight and accurately judge its position to within one one-hundredth of an inch, the M.L.B. tested out “full A.B.S.” in its minor leagues in 2023 and 2024. It was still unpopular. According to Major League Baseball’s official Web site, the “fans, players, managers, and other personnel” preferred “a human element of umpiring that involves feel for the game.”
The question wasn’t whether A.B.S. was more accurate than humans—it was—but whether umpires bring something to the plate that would be lost if they were no longer there. The former World Series M.V.P. and Atlantic League pitching coach Frank “Sweet Music” Viola was thrown out of a game in 2019 for trying to argue with an umpire relaying an A.B.S. call—the first coach to ever accomplish such a feat. “You can’t argue and beat a robot,” Viola lamented at the time. “You could try your hardest, but I promise you, he’s not going to talk back.”
And with that, Viola raised a crucial concern: Without living, breathing, fallible umpires, who would coaches like Earl Weaver curse at? Who would pitchers like Jonathan Papelbon blame poor performances on? Who would fans berate? Scott remembers wondering whether baseball would simply become “a video game,” officiated by lifeless computers. “I just would rather have a human call things,” he admits. “Yes, once in a while, things don’t go your way. It’s just the way sport is. It’s a game.”
For now, a compromise has been reached. During this year’s spring-training games, an A.B.S. “challenge system” was instigated, in which human umpires called the balls and strikes but each team had two opportunities to consult A.B.S. during a game to challenge questionable calls. In this it was similar to the video assistant referee (or V.A.R.) in professional soccer, which helps referees avoid major errors by checking the legality of every goal scored.
Like V.A.R., A.B.S. threatens to disrupt the rhythms of the game, and even this pairing of man and machine wasn’t terribly popular with the players. “Can’t we just be judged by humans?” pleaded Max Scherzer, the future Hall of Fame pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays, earlier this year. There’s still a large body in pads to yell at, but for how much longer? Tennis’s Hawk-Eye technology originally began as a “challenge review” system too. “It’s coming, whether you like it or not,” says Scott.
Jack Sullivan is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
