RoboUmp Hits the Big Leagues

And it's baseball season. If you haven't watched a game in a while, it can be a little confusing to jump back in. Major League Baseball has introduced a lot of rule changes in the last few years, including a countdown clock for pitchers to make the game go faster. They've also made it a rule that pitchers have to show their hands to the Empire between

andnings to make sure that the players aren't using any GUI substances to get an extra strong grip on the ball. But this season, the one rule change that everybody is talking about is the introduction of robot umpires. Starting in 2026, if a player doesn't like a ball or a strike call, they can appeal to

a robot arbitrator called the ABS system, who can overturn the call. And now it's going to be challenged.

“You may remember the name ABS system because we talked about it back in 2023.”

Today we're going to replay that episode and then I'll be joined by producer Chris Perubay for an update on how the robot umpires are doing now that they've reached the major leagues. All right. Playball.

If you're a baseball fan, you might remember the 1997 playoffs. That's when pitcher Levant Hernandez was unstoppable. Hernandez was a rookie for the Florida Marlins and his masterpiece was Game 5 of the Nationally Championship Series against Atlanta. That's producer Chris Perubay.

The fun Hernandez struck out 15 batters that game, which for context is so many batters.

It was an incredible night, but a lot of his strikes, they weren't actually strikes.

Hernandez was pretty consistently missing the zone.

“This pitch is, I would say, a foot to feet outside of the strike zone, not close called”

a strike. That's baseball analyst Katie Nolan. She vividly remembers that game because it really was not good. I mean, okay, second pitch way outside called a strike. Agreed.

Agreed. Katie and I rewatched video from that game with, let's call it a perverse fascination. Almost none of the batters actually swung at his pitches. You see Hernandez just winding up and throwing ball after ball like a foot outside the strike zone.

And then, inexplicably, the Empire Eric Greg, he just kept making the hand signal for a strike. It was so bad. It was probably the worst, um, um, I'm piring.

“I've, I can remember the outside of this strike zone, um, it just didn't.”

It was like a never-ending strike zone.

In case you don't know anything about baseball in the major leagues, there are four umpires on the field, one behind each base and one behind home plate. The home plate umpire has the most important job, which is calling balls and strikes. A strike is basically any hit-able pitch, something over the plate between the batters chest and his knees and a ball is everything else.

I remember watching games as a kid and whatever an umpire blew it, I would say, I could do better than that. And so I tried. I was a little league in high school umpire from the age of 14 until my early 20s. And I think I could have gone pro.

If it weren't for my poor eyesight, my version to getting yelled at and the time I was hit in the throat by a baseball. My point is, even in the little leagues, getting calls right is a lot harder than it looks. And at the pro level, the baseball is moving at like 95 miles an hour.

It's kind of incredible that on average, umpires get it right about 94 to 97% of the

time on strike calls. And umpires are getting better. The worst umpire today would have been upper tier in 1997. But the crazy high speed of the baseball means sometimes umpires are going to get it wrong. It just feels to me like it's asking a lot of the umpire to be able to recognize if

it nifty inside of the strike zone on its way over the plate or if it did in and I know we all make fun of the egregious calls. But I feel like some of them, you're not standing back there. You're not having to do it entirely with your eye. It's got to be really difficult.

One study from 2018 found that umpires blow about 14 calls every game.

And it makes a difference like in Levant Hernandez game.

“The Florida Marlins came out on top in a few weeks later.”

They won the World Series. These calls can make all the difference between a win and a loss, a championship. And sitting at home for six months, just wondering what could have been, if he'd only made the right call, given the human fallibility of umpires, Major League Baseball has been considering something drastic, something that would take us up to 100% accuracy.

They have a plan to replace human umpires with robots. Like any scenario where a human being is being replaced by a robot, there's the question of whether robots can do a better, more accurate job. And in baseball, a sport that is legendary for its quirks and its general human imperfection, there's another trickier question.

Is more accurate what we actually want?

The idea of replacing an umpire with a machine isn't new.

In the 1950s, the Brooklyn Dodgers tested a robot umpire designed by General Electric. The GE umpire was a big machine, it kind of looked like a barbecue hooked up to a especially trick-out home plate.

“If the ball cast a shadow over the plate, the machine would light up a big red button”

indicating a shrank. The trouble is, the machine didn't work very well. It made a lot of bad calls. And if it was the night game, the robot umpire just didn't work at all. In the 1950s, the technology just wasn't ready, and the robot umpire went nowhere.

For years, the idea seemed like a non-starter. But a few years ago, the commissioner of Major League Baseball Rob Manfred said he was considering robot umps for the big leagues. The robot umpires of the 21st century are a lot more sophisticated than a barbecue. But modern robot umpires, they aren't technically robots.

What a lot of people picture is, is like, you know, beep, boop, boop, kind of, a metallic thing behind home plate. What it really is, it's this system. That's that Kelvin. He's an editor and sports writer at the New Yorker.

And today's version of the robot umpire is actually a series of HD cameras.

But for some reason, the name integrated camera baseball tracking system has never caught

on. So for this story, we're just going to keep calling them robots. I prefer Robo. So I just think Robo sounds better. Baseball won't be the first sport to use robots to referee games.

In tennis, there's a tracking system called Hawkeye. The campaign point where Robo is in or out of bounds. And it was good. Whoa. What a show.

And in soccer, the use motion tracking cameras to help determine off sides. And whether the ball has crossed the goal line and the goal has been disallowed. In fact, most major league baseball stadiums already have a sophisticated ball tracking system in place. Those were installed in the early 2000s for TV broadcasts to give fans a clear picture

of what happened during every pitch. To track things like exit velocity off the bat, how fast the ball is moving off the bat, spin rate, it counts every single revolution of a baseball from when it leaves a pitcher's hand to when it gets to the plate. So they have these very sophisticated missile tracking systems, essentially, in ball parks.

By the way, he is not exaggerating. This is based on missile tracking technology. If you've watched a baseball game on TV, you've seen this tracking system in action. In replays, broadcasters will show you charts and scatter plots to lay out where the ball landed inside the strike zone.

But the umpires that people actually making the calls don't have access to this information only viewers do, which creates some awkward moments for fans.

“Wait, if we know that's a strike, why is he calling it a ball?”

It just doesn't make sense. Why doesn't he have the information I have? He should make the right call. But look, baseball is a pretty conservative sport. It's slow to embrace change.

So for now, robot umpires are being tested on the minor leagues. To work out some of the kinks and to help fans get used to the whole concept. In 2019, robot ump technology has been working its way through the minor leagues, where it's called ABS for automatic balls and strikes. Last year, the ABS made its way to AAA, the highest level of minor league baseball.

I wanted to see this robot umpire, okay, ABS system in action. So I bought a ticket to watch some minor league baseball last summer in fabulous El Paso, where the hometown chihuahua were taking on the albuquerque isotopes. But I got COVID, so I had to watch the game at home. Coming into the game, I was worried the baseball experience would feel totally different

But actually, I didn't miss the human umpires, because they were still there.

Fans here tonight's umpires, behind home plate is Dylan Wilson, down the first baseline

Cody home. For those you worried about robots coming for human jobs, at least in this case, the humans are safe.

“Baseball still needs humans for lots of important jobs, like calling timeouts or cleaning”

home plate with those tiny adorable brooms. This robot umpire was actually a collaboration between the ABS system that made the call and the human umpire who set it out loud. I listened with the airpiece along to a minor league game, and it's more or less instantaneous. The ball hits the glove, you kind of hear the smack of the ball in the glove, and a split

second later you hear strike or ball, and it's funny, the strike is very peppy, and sounds very encouraging, and the ball is ball, kind of disappointed.

The man's always just saying ball of strike, ball, strike, ball, strike.

That's Fred de Hesus. He was actually the first umpire to use the ABS system in 2019. Fun fact, his earpiece is now part of the collection at the baseball Hall of Fame. I obviously couldn't get there as a player, so I made my earpiece made it.

“My joke is six Puerto Ricans have made it, and one Puerto Ricans earpiece has made it.”

Fred says at first he was wary about the ABS, but he came around pretty quickly. You know, one in Rome, you do what the Romans want. They wanted you to follow the system, you call it. I know this collaboration sounds, you know, a little ridiculous, but watching the game, I was pleasantly surprised.

It was pretty smooth. It didn't look like a game, umpired by a sophisticated missile robot. It just looked like a regular afternoon at the ballpark. Yeah, so here's Bernard, right?

He did hit her against the lefty groom from the full wind up first pitch.

There are no publicly available statistics on the accuracy of the ABS system, but anecdotally Fred de Hesus says it was pretty damn good.

“It was very accurate. There were times where you would go, "Oh, but again, you did what”

that machine wanted." There's no dispute here. The ABS is more accurate than a human umpired. Fred says there were some minor glitches when he used it, but nothing could be worked out by the time the system reaches the major leagues.

The accuracy thing is huge, because there's just so much money on the line. A bad call at the wrong time can ruin a player's career, and sports betting is such a huge industry now, I get why the major leagues want a more accurate system. But a few days after watching the robot umpired in action, my doubts started to creep back in, because accuracy isn't everything.

Here's Zach Healthand. I don't think most people watch sports to see the fairest or most accurate outcome. But for me, the argument comes down to efficiency and accuracy versus charm and drama and dialogue. The thing is, for more than a hundred years, baseball has been played by humans and

unpired by other humans. And in that process, we've introduced lots of small quirks and inefficiencies. For example, baseball stadiums don't have standard dimensions. So a home run at Fenway Park might just be a long flyball at Dodger Stadium. Baseball just has all these unstandardized things.

One of them is the application of the strike zone. Again, the textbook strike zone is supposed to be the player's chest to their knees over the plate. But most human umpires don't exactly follow those guidelines. There's lots of pitches that are considered hitable that don't land inside the textbook

strike zone. And human umpires usually call those strikes. But the robot umpire thief then slower to pick that up. In 2019, the ABS system was introduced to the Atlantic League. And it was programmed to call the textbook strike zone.

But most fans and players thought the system felt off. The robot was calling a lot of hitable pitches as balls. So when the strike zone is so coldly unchanging, uh, that sometimes presents some problems when the strike zone is smaller than what you used to, games can drag on. The Zykelfen says the league needed to reprogram the ABS to be less accurate and how

it call balls and strikes.

and that better represented what the real strike zone is.

You can program the ABS to call a less accurate game. But you can't program it to do all these other things that human umpires just do instinctively. So I'm going to let you in on a little dirty baseball secret. Umpires are constantly changing the strike zone based on context. It's raining.

Let's move this along. Let's get this over with. Or one team is up by a lot. Let's just go home. When a pitcher is struggling, there's a demonstrable effect that the umpires own gets bigger.

Sometimes it gets as much as 50% bigger.

“That's what they call the compassionate umpire effect.”

So a pitcher's having a really tough time. We're going to help them out and they don't do this consciously. When you leave it up to the machines to decide balls and strikes, you're ignoring years of training and experience and intuition that every great umpire has. You're taking away one of those small imperfections that makes baseball kind of romantic.

There is a trade off because you do lose this discussion. You do lose these quirks, these injustices, these twists of fate where someone blinks or gets dirt in their eye and they kind of make a bad call and that changes everything. I want to see how people react to that. We watch baseball to feel something to divert ourselves and sometimes it's nice to feel

righteously mad against an umpire or to feel like you got away with something. Okay, but let's talk about righteous anger for a minute. Because Zach is totally right, yelling at the umpire is a part of the game. Umpires get yelled at by fans and players and mascots pretty much non-stop because unlike

“other sports, baseball centers the umpire.”

The umpire is right behind the plate making judgment calls on every play. Usually the yelling is fun and cathartic and professional impires can handle it but it sucks to experience that. Here's Katie Nolan. Imagine going to work knowing you could get a shard of wood directly into your face

or you could get hit by a 100 mile per hour projectile in the face on a bad day and on a good feeling of this job is like you make calls that get people to tell you that you suck at your job and you're the worst and you ruined the game.

You know, I've got a video on Instagram right now that's got over 3 million views where

the player is saying, "Fretty, you're the worst one, apparently, how did they make you up?" Now he's obviously joking, but this is what the world wants to hear. They want umpires to be ridiculed. And it's not just ridiculed. There are stories of umpires receiving death threats or even being physically assaulted by fans.

Tonight is Staten Island parent coaches accuse of punching the umpires so hard it left him with a broken jaw. CBS 2's Lisa Rosner spoke with friends of the umpire in Somerson. People get carried away and it can get scary. I remembered this little league game where I made a really bad third strike call and after

the game, a coach was waiting to yell at me in the parking lot. The abuse is actually the primary reason that I stopped umpiring. And it's why my favorite thing about the robot umps isn't their accuracy. It's their ability to bring down the temperature. Zach Health had noticed this too when he saw a robot umpiring person.

Fans were a lot less likely to get into arguments when they knew it was a machine making the calls. Some fans who as fans do and as part of the pleasure of baseball were heckling the umpire when I was out there. At one point, one of the fans who did know that they were using robot umpires this season

in that league pointed up at the hardware above home plate and said, you know, it's not the umpire. This is just the strike zone.

“And the fan was humiliated in a certain way, very humbled and was like, you know what?”

Is actually calling a pretty good game. Watching the Isotope's Chihuahua's game, I remember this one at bat. So the Isotope's third baseman Taylor Snyder was at the plate. Still one in two bases juiced. Here's the pitch takes a cold third strike breaking ball inside porter.

That ends the inning. Isotope's do not score. There was two hits. So the batter, Snyder, he disagreed with the call. He thought it was inside and he was clearly furious.

He starts to turn towards the ump and it looks like he is ready to yell. But then he didn't. He stopped himself and he walked back to the dugout.

I've never seen that before.

And for me, that's a big plus for the idea of robot umps. Ultimately, the robot umpires are coming. They're going to be used in all AAA games this season.

as an appeal system if the player doesn't like a call. Robot umpires are probably going to show up in the major leagues in the next couple of years. And I know baseball purists are going to be really mad. I get that. I don't love the general idea of robots muscling in on human jobs.

“But I think I can live with this new technology.”

Because I'm in favor of anything that makes us see umpires as people. Even if that thing is a robot.

That story was first broadcast in 2023.

Today the robot umpire has officially been introduced at the major league level and after the break, Chris Berube will tell us how it's going. So, we're back with Chris Berube, hey, Chris. Hey, Roman. So, Chris, what has changed since we first broadcast that story?

So the robot umpire has arrived in major league baseball. But not in the way that I was predicting certainly that a lot of people were predicting. So remember in that story, we talked about a system where the robot umpire makes all the calls and then the human umpire says it out loud, right? Like they were trying that at the AAA level.

So major league baseball is not doing that. Instead, they are using the robot umpire as a kind of challenge system. So right now, human umpires are still making every ball and strike call. But if a player disagrees, they can challenge the call and then the automated balls and

strikes will determine who was correct.

So they're using the robot umpires, but humans are still doing most of the work. So this was not what I was expecting either. So how does that end up working during the game? So Roman, I've actually sent you a link with an ABS challenge from a game this week between Atlanta and the Kansas City Royals.

“So I want you to pull it up and narrate through like, what is it that you see?”

Get pitch comes in, it looks a little low, okay. The catcher taps his helmet, okay, and then the umpire goes to the side to check what's happening. But all right, we got a challenge, and then they show a graphic of the ball. Just sort of hitting the bottom of the strike zone as you can see, this is very close call.

Yeah. I mean, the umpire does a really good job actually. Yeah, that's a really close borderline call. So the fact that the catcher knew to challenge that one is impressive, but yeah, yeah. So that's what it looks like.

It's like the ball comes in and then either the catcher or the hit or or the pitcher taps their head, taps their helmet. Wow. And then the umpire says, okay, there's a challenge on the field, and then everybody looks up at the scoreboard and they show the graphic, like within about 10 seconds, you

know what happened. And then it shows the graphic and then the ABS decides, okay, that just greets the strike zone. So that's that's a strike or, you know, that was actually outside. So that's a ball.

So that's how it works. Um, okay. So my question is this, okay. How much does this slow the game down? Like baseball is not like a lightning fast game to begin with, you know, because

I would imagine, like, why wouldn't you challenge everything, you know, like, and they're forced to slow everything down even more? This is a really good point, and I think this is what people were worried about with the introduction of the challenge system, but they've put in a rule to limit how often this happens.

So each team only gets two challenges a game, but if you make a successful challenge, you get to keep it.

So basically, each team gets the right to be wrong twice.

So if you, you know, if you challenge it, you're wrong, you lose that challenge for the rest of the game. So it incentivizes really only picking your spots, like really only doing it on important plays or plays where you're like, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this one. That's right.

“You have to save your challenges for when it really matters.”

That's it. Yeah. So are people happy with this so far? I'd say for the most part, yes, so for players, like, this has been pretty good because, you know, before if there was a bad call, they had to kind of grin and bear it and go back

to the dugout and be angry. But now, if you times a game, you know, they can get a call overturned, like they have some recourse. So that's cool for them. The fans for the most part, they seem pretty into it, which has been kind of a surprise.

So this is anecdotal, like, at the time of recording, or one week into this experiment. But all the baseball fans at my life, so that I've spoken to have been like, huh, this is actually kind of fun. I'm surprised. Well, what's fun about it?

Well, I think what a lot of people were worried about was how this would affect the drama of the game, right? Because instead of having a human make calls, you'd have, you know, a clinical robot making the calls. But it's actually creating more drama, which is because a couple times a game now, a player

I think that was a ball.

“And then everybody looks up at the scoreboard together.”

And then, like, fans go crazy when their team is right, you know, in their challenges. So it's not what I was worried about, which was, oh, it's going to be a human versus robot that's kind of a boring conflict. Instead, it is this moment of player versus umpire with the robot as the arbitrator. Right.

And that's actually kind of fun. It's kind of fun to watch that happen. I mean, it does sound fun. So how are the umpires taking it? Well, that is a different story.

So obviously, no active major league umpires have said anything about it yet. I'm sure they're still in, you know, kind of a wait and see phase and, you know, you don't want to risk your job by saying something about major league baseball.

But a couple of retired umpires have given interviews and basically what they've said is like,

I feel terrible for the umpires right now because if you think about this from an umpire perspective, this cannot be good for yourself a steam, right, or for your reputation because if you're an umpire several times a game now, someone questions your judgment, and then everybody looks up at a giant scoreboard to see if you blew it. And if you blew it, everyone cheers.

Like 30,000 people are cheering for a mistake that you made. And for the accurate umpires, like, doesn't really matter that much. But for the ones who make mistakes more often, like there's a couple of umpires who have been genuinely humiliated by the ABS system and we're only a weekend to this. So firm.

Yeah, that doesn't sound fun at all. Yeah. So I want to show you an example of this from an, uh, I want to turn your attention to the case of CB Buckner versus AU Genio Suarez. So CB Buckner is an umpire.

He's been in the league for about 26 years. And AU Genio Suarez is the third baseman for the Cincinnati Reds. And earlier this week, when we're recording this, they had a bit of a notorious dust up involving ABS, okay, let's watch it. So here we are.

We are in Cincinnati and this pitch is clearly low. Hey, Genio Suarez taps his helmet to indicate he wants a challenge. Uh, Buckner looks out to the audience to say the call is being challenged. Then we look up at the scoreboard. And it's pretty obvious that this one was like a little bit outside the zone.

So Suarez was right, call gets overturned.

This was a third strike call, too.

So this would have ended the inning, but the city gets another pitch. And then it happens again, a pitch later. So there's another pitch outside the zone. Suarez challenges again, Buckner's looking pretty upset. He talks to the audience.

He's like, all right, I guess we're doing this again. And it's pretty obvious he was even more wrong this time. And now the crowd's losing it.

“They're like, yeah, now obviously this is great drama, right?”

And for the fans, this is cool because it's like, you get to challenge. And it's like, we were right. The umpires wrong. Are you blind? You know all this stuff.

Yeah, sure. This umpire, you know he had a whole stadium full of people cheering because he did a bad job at work. Yeah. And this clip went super viral.

I did not know the name CB Buckner before this week. And now everybody in baseball knows who he is, right? They've been all these articles that are like, here's another thing CB Buckner did. And this probably would not have happened without the ABS system challenging. Yes.

Yeah. That sounds very rough for him. My heart goes out to CB. It's about to get worse. So CB Buckner in that game got six calls overturned.

Oh my God. Oh my God.

And now basically anytime he does something wrong, there's people on social media and

people in the baseball media being like CB Buckner screws up again. And a contextual note, CB Buckner is one of the few black umpires in baseball. So this is obviously not ideal that this is the person coming in for so much criticism. I should know he is a below average umpire. Like anybody who does the like tracking of umpire accuracy says like CB Buckner doesn't have

a great eye, but like you got to feel bad for this guy. And then later in the week, he got hit in the mask by a foul tip. Like there was a foul ball that hit him in the face and he had to leave a game. So you know when it means a pause for this guy, like you got to feel for this guy on a human level.

Absolutely. He's just having the worst week ever. My, my sympathies for sure. Yeah, me too. And when we did this original story, I came out softly on the side of Robonafires because

“I thought it would help people see umpires like the humans as human beings, right?”

Because it would take out some of this like vitriol against umpires in the game. But in this particular case, it's kind of doing the opposite. Like it is put this person under a microscope. It is empowered people to, you know, yell at this guy and be mean to him on social media and stuff.

And you know, CB Buckner's a grown man, you know, comes with the territory. But like it has kind of done the opposite of what I was thinking the robot umpires would accomplish. Yeah. Yeah.

So I guess we'll just have to watch the rest of the season and see how it goes for all the other umpires. But I'm totally intrigued. Thanks for the primer. Of course.

And I hope we've given everybody some extra context when you're watching a baseball game this summer. Awesome.

Thanks, Robin.

“99% of what was produced this week by Chris Brube.”

The 2023 episode was edited by Kelly Prime and fact checked by Graham Haitia, mixed

by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Reo. You can find Zach Helphin's article about robot umpires in the New Yorker.

“His latest feature story is about airport lounges.”

It is a must read for fans of 99.

Yeah, you're going to love it. Katie Nolan has recently launched a new sports podcast called Casuals.

“You can find it wherever you get your podcasts or executive producer is Kathy too.”

Our senior editor is Delaney Hall.

Kurt Colstett is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Jason Dillion, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Blaschmadan, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, Joe Rosenberg, and me Roman Mars. The 99% of his logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the serious exam podcast family now had quartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. Beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on blue skies as well as our own discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.