Robo-umps could be in the majors as soon as 2025, and human umpires sure could use their help
New York Yankees manager Arron Boone, left, argues with the home plate umpire after Aaron Judge is ejected for arguing strikes in the seventh inning against the Detroit Tigers at Yankee Stadium, Saturday, May 4, 2024, in Bronx. Credit: Corey Sipkin
When Aaron Judge was ejected on May 4 for arguing balls and strikes, it was the rarest of occurrences, a solar eclipse-level phenomenon. Never before had Judge been tossed from a baseball game, dating to Little League, and he was the first Yankees captain to get the hook since Don Mattingly in 1994.
But what if we told you that in the relatively near future, such ejections will become obsolete, dumped into history’s dustbin along with pitchers hitting and afternoon World Series games. We won’t spend an entire news cycle berating a sensitive umpire’s itchy trigger finger because that Judge episode will never materialize.
The matter will be over in a blink, leaving no time for expletives to be hurled. The entire argument will be settled on the big screen, with Trackman or Hawk-Eye the final authority. Everyone in the stadium will watch the path of the pitch — just as you would on MLB’s Gameday or a TV broadcast — and the final call should be indisputable. The ball either will be in the strike-zone box or not.
So to rewind that May 4 incident, Tigers reliever Tyler Holton rifled that 93-mph four-seam fastball to the lower outside edge of the plate and umpire Ryan Blakney rung up Judge on a debatable strike three. Judge someday will be able to immediately challenge the call; there will be no need to fire off the few choice words that prompted his ejection. Once Judge views the Hawk-Eye replay, there will be nothing left to say.
In that future, it will be about getting the call correct, spiced up by the added drama of watching it all unfold, Wimbledon-style, on the centerfield Jumbotron.
Here in 2024, the actual call turned into a footnote, with everyone instead using the Judge incident as a treatise on the lack of accountability for umpires.
No one in the game benefits from that — not the players and especially not the umpires, who always tend to lead with their chin in any public spats involving transparency between the lines. Which is why MLB needs robo-umps to come to the rescue, or in this case, at least the automated ball-strike system (ABS) still under development this season in the minors.
Figure the challenge version to get called up to the majors first, with each team receiving three over nine innings and each correct challenge not deducting from the total. Otherwise, the umpire calls balls and strikes as he usually would until the pitcher, catcher or batter asks for a challenge inside a tight two-second window. The Hawk-Eye tracking system then will show the pitch on the scoreboard in delivering its verdict.
“The technology is awesome,” commissioner Rob Manfred said this past week in a meeting with the Associated Press Sports Editors. “I mean it’s good to a 100th of an inch. It’s unbelievable how accurate the technology is. The technology is viable with any geometric shape of the strike zone. You just tell it what to call and that’s what it will call. The technology piece is really in great shape.”
The problem? There are a few bugs to iron out. Using it in Syracuse or Buffalo does not involve quite the same stakes as the Bronx, for instance. But MLB also has to determine what it wants the strike zone to look like, and that’s what worries the players.
Pitchers are suspicious of the commissioner’s hunger for more offense (more hits = more action = more entertainment = more TV ratings) and remain wary of a more hitter-friendly zone. The paradox? Shrinking the strike zone would increase walks, which in turn put a drag on pace of play, another big no-no.
So the ABS system continues in its beta phase down in the minors, with three games of each series using the full robo-ump format (the plate umpire gets the call through an earpiece) and the other three games going with the challenge protocols. Meanwhile, the wait continues up in the bigs.
“There are two significant issues that we’re working on,” Manfred said. “The biggest that remains is setting the strike zone for each individual hitter . . . We’re now using a camera-based system in the minor leagues that actually sets it every at-bat. So if Rob Manfred stands up straight in at-bat No. 1 and then hunches over in at-bat No. 2, there’s going to be a different strike zone and the camera will adjust that. We need to get a season’s worth of results on that to see exactly how it worked.
“The second one is the strike zone itself. We’re going to have to have an agreement with the players on the geometry of what’s called. We have a strike zone. The strike zone in the rule book is a rectangle and umpires right now call an oval. We know that empirically. You have to think through what you do to the game in terms of offense and performance if you start calling these corners that nobody ever calls.”
In other words, the tech sounds just about ready to roll. And once Manfred deems the ABS system MLB-caliber, the commissioner won’t waste a minute deploying it. The sooner he can eliminate umpire screwups stealing the game’s spotlight, the better.
Say what you want about replay review — yes, it’s far from perfect — but through Wednesday’s games, 316 plays have been reviewed with 159 overturned. That’s a tick more than half (50.3%).
Not only are umps human, but their jobs are incredibly difficult, seeing as they are wrong half the time. Calling balls and strikes is the hardest part. They need help, ASAP, with the strong possibility the robots will lend a hand next season.
“It could be in some form as early as 2025,” Manfred said. “My bet is, at least at the outset, it will be used in a challenge system to fix the big miss, let people get used to it and see how it performs on the big-league level.”
Red Sox Sale-taxed
As if it wasn’t bad enough that the Red Sox gave Chris Sale one of the worst contracts in club history, being dominated by their former lefthander Wednesday night — on Boston’s dime — further added to that humiliation.
Funny how Sale, 35, has found his vintage self in Atlanta’s uniform, and after striking out 10 in six scoreless innings in a 5-0 victory at Truist Park, he improved to 5-1 with a 2.95 ERA in seven starts. Sale never had more than six wins in any of his final four seasons in Boston. On top of that, the Red Sox picked up $17 million of his $27.5 million salary for this year in order to get back highly touted second baseman Vaughn Grissom, 23, who was hitting .120 (3-for-25) in six games for the Sox.
So how bad was Sale’s contract in Boston? He signed a five-year, $145 million extension during spring training of 2019, then had to be shut down the following year in February for Tommy John surgery, when the deal officially kicked in. Sale missed the entire first season of the extension (2020) and then went 11-7 with a 3.93 ERA as more injuries limited him to a total of 31 starts in three years before he waived his no-trade rights last December for the trade to Atlanta.
“I went into the offseason on a mission,” Sale told reporters Wednesday at Truist Park. “I got after it. I knew I had to do it this year.”
The Red Sox financing Sale’s resurgence in another uniform brought to mind the Mets’ money-eating trades of Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander last season. Both were considerably smarter business moves by owner Steve Cohen. The Mets agreed to pay $35 million of the remaining $58 million on Scherzer, who has made a total of eight starts (4-2, 3.20 ERA, 45 innings) since the trade and has yet to pitch this season coming off winter back surgery (a thumb issue has further delayed his rehab). As for Verlander, Cohen also picked up $35 million of his remaining $58 million, and after going 7-3 with a 3.31 ERA in 11 post-trade starts last season, he’s currently 1-1 with a 4.43 ERA in four starts for the 14-24 Astros (his 2024 debut was delayed by shoulder soreness).
One thing to watch regarding the 41-year-old Verlander: He holds a player-vesting $35 million option for 2025 that activates if he pitches 140 innings this season and does not have an arm injury that would keep him off the 2025 Opening Day roster. Cohen is on the hook for $17.5 million of that option, so there is a considerable financial stake for the folks in Flushing. To date, Verlander has 22 1⁄3 innings in the books, so it could go down to the wire.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
