Replay in Baseball: Balls and Strikes

Isn’t the strike zone something like shoulder to knees and over the plate or something like that? It’s based on the body and stance of the batter in the box, at least in terms of height.

Having something that detects whether or not the ball went over the plate is fine by me. But it’ll be impossible to create a system that has every single player’s size and stance pre-loaded and correct for every pitch and every at-bat.

Then what do we need umpires for?

Without a doubt if we had instant replay on close outs, the Brewers would have gone to a tie breaker with the Cubs for the division if not win the entire thing.

In your quote:
“Also, there’s times when pitchers get tossed because of body language when they throw a ball right down the middle and the ump just stands there.”

Were you being facetious, or do you have examples of this? Just curious.

People pay to watch the best players compete. The “human element” of bad umpiring simply intereferes with this objective. You don’t see track&field olympians subject to the whims of human error because we can use technology to help show us who is actually the best athlete and that is what people want to know above all.

As far as the technology to call balls&strikes goes, this is ridiculously simple. Home plate senses if the pitch is inside or outside and and the distance it crosses above the plate is instantly compared to the batter’s measurements which is stored in a file. Benefits aside from obviously improving accuracy on calls include LESS HEADHUNTING because their is no need for batters to crowd the plate to reach pitches off the outside corner that some BS ump wants to make his “signature” zone. The home plate umpire would be relegated to judging on wild pitches, hit batsmen, foul balls, interference, making calls in the event of system failure, etc. and and they might even learn something about the actual RULE BOOK strikezone while they are at it. Professional tennis fixed their umpiring problems with technology years ago and there are ZERO people complaining about it as a result because they realize it helps them determine who the best players are.

The downside? Not much at the professional level but in the amateur ranks the price of entry could preclude this from happening at the small parks. Although for a few hundred bucks I bet you could make a home plate and a special baseball that does this. Dang maybe they just need me to invent it already!

In general, I’m open to new technology being introduced to baseball so long as: 1) it doesn’t waste additional time (rarely a problem in most cases for baseball) and 2) it is used to ensure the right call is made as much as practical, rather than being some kind of goofy gimick (ie, I would accept replay for many situations, but I’m strongly against the “challenge flag” ideas, as it allows for the wrong call to stand in cases for no reason other than the “that’s how the NFL does it” argument).

In this case, though, even though ESPN already has a reputable system in place (I’ve read that K Zone is supposedly accurate within 1/2", although I’m not sure how this was tested), there’s other things that need to be considered for it to be officially approved by MLB—namely, who administers the system and how is the system calibrated? In my mind, because the official count/score/lineup/etc are always kept exclusively on the field (unlike, say, basketball where the referee must coordinate the official time with the scoreboard clock, whereas in baseball the scoreboard could have the totally wrong information displayed without affecting the official results in the slightest), a member of the umpiring crew would have to setup/monitor the K-Zone system during every game to ensure the integrity was preserved. I can’t see MLB adding a new official very easily considering there is no strong public outcry for the change at the moment. While, in theory, the home team could be responsible for this equipment, considering the number of things a home grounds crew can do to subtly influence the game, is it really reasonable to give teams a chance to do this with balls & strikes (I’m not even sure how this would factor in, but why introduce the possibility, as clearly teams would try to stack the deck in their favor as much as possible). This isn’t a particularly insurmountable problem, but knowing MLB they’d have a long fight to reconcile themselves to a change in the umpiring crews. …and more often than not, the umpires do a decent enough job.

Secondly, in order to ensure the results were truly reflective of conditions on the field within the required tolerances, the results would need to be thoroughly field tested. To my knowledge, ESPN does not have such a field test for K-Zone, as there’s no real purpose for them to waste the time/money developing one. The theory behind it (http://webusers.npl.illinois.edu/~a-nathan/pob/TrackingBaseballs.pdf) does seem sound, but for it to be an official “rule of the game” it would need to be field verified in some way. I’m not saying this can’t be done, but it would need to be done before implementation to ensure we were actually improving the consistency of the calls. If my job has taught me anything it’s that just because “the computer says it” doesn’t mean it’s necessarily any better than the “old fashioned way” (typically, both methods seem to be wrong in subtly different ways :) ). Again, this isn’t a unsolvable problem; just one that isn’t necessarily solved yet and would need to be solved before implementation.

Personally, I agree with RiskyBusiness’ comment that for the time being it would be a more valuable tool to help with umpire self-improvement than as an immediate replacement for their calling the game. This presumes the umpires would be amenable to such a system which I couldn’t comment on one way or the other…