Aesthetically, there doesn’t appear to be much of a difference between computerized strike zones and the traditional, human umpire strike zone.
Major League Baseball has begun experimenting with automated balls and strikes in the Low-A Southeast League, where the Pirates’ Low-A affiliate, the Bradenton Marauders, play. The teams there were sent a schedule before the season for when their balls and strikes would be called by an umpire and when they would be called by a computer. Bradenton manager Jonathan Johnston says it typically breaks down to four computerized strike zones and two umpire-called strike zones per week.
If you were sitting in the stands watching the game, it would be hard to tell the difference between the two. Even when the robots are in charge, the umpire is still there behind the catcher. He just has an earpiece in, connected to an iPhone, which tells him whether each pitch is a ball or a strike. Then he relays the call.
The potential impacts, however, could be wide-ranging. Pirates catcher Jacob Stallings, for instance, says a vast majority of his physical training is focused on pitch framing, making a pitch look good to umpires to get more strikes called for his pitchers. That’s certainly true of almost all catchers in baseball, but it would be moot without the human element calling balls and strikes.
“You can only do so much blocking and throwing just because of the wear and tear that it takes on you,” Stallings said. “It’s really the majority of what I do and what I work on, aside from game planning and that type of thing. But in terms of physical work, that’s the vast majority of the stuff I work on in-season. So yeah, it would change things a lot, but we’ll see.”
Bradenton catcher Eli Wilson still works on framing himself, but he’s also now experiencing the new, automated way of doing things, with the possibility that MLB will implement automated strike zones throughout all levels of baseball sometime in the near future.
“Until you go to that computer strike zone, receiving — statistically — is just shown to be so impactful to the game, and so it’s hard to ignore that,” Wilson told the Post-Gazette. “If throwing and blocking were shown to be where you can make the most impact defensively as a catcher and receiving was like third, then guys probably wouldn’t be doing so much work on it still, but the fact that it’s the most important thing right now, it’s still imperative that you’re successful back there.”
So how has the experiment gone so far?
According to Wilson, it’s been fairly smooth, at least for the assumed intended purposes — albeit with a few snags.
Sometimes, Wilson says, the calls from the computer are delayed. Though Bradenton hasn’t experienced it, he has heard of instances where there’s a 3-2 count and a batter assumes he’s taken ball four and heads up the base path. A few seconds pass before the umpire gets the strike call, and the batter, halfway down to first base already, is called out.
If he doesn’t like the call, too bad. There’s no use arguing with an iPhone.
But there have been reasons to be upset. As Wilson currently understands it, the computer is currently measuring where the ball crosses the front of the plate. If any part of the ball touches any part of the strike zone, it’s a strike. So on low, breaking pitches, the very edge of the ball may cross the very bottom of the strike zone at the front of the plate, but by the time it gets to the batter, the ball is at his feet. That’s still a strike.
“We have an iPad in the dugout. We’ll go in and look at pitches and be like, ‘There’s no way that that was a strike,’ and you come in and look at the iPad and sure enough, it just barely clipped the zone,” Wilson said. “So yeah, hitters sometimes will argue for a second, and all the umpire does is point to his earpiece. And it’s the end of the conversation. It’s pretty funny.”
Johnston used another pitch as an example of some of the kinks that need to be worked out. Sometimes a high-and-outside, backed up breaking ball will just barely clip the corner of the zone and be called a strike, a pitch that a human umpire would never give to the pitcher.
And that may be fine-tuned out of the automated zone, as Johnston said he believes there could be a shape adjustment to the pre-defined strike zone.
“I think what they’re talking about — and they’ve kind of already known that — is the possibility of making it more of an oval-shape, which I think would be good, just to kind of clip those corners off,” Johnston said. “If it’s on the edge, it has to be a better height. Take the extreme corners away. Other than that, I like it. I think it’s consistent.”
One of the more unintended consequences could be the aforementioned changing of the fundamentals of receiving pitches. Wilson says the hardest pitch to frame is a low breaking ball because you have to make a split-second decision whether or not to get down and block the ball or stay up and make it look pretty. He says he’s found himself get into a block position early on and just worry about keeping the ball in front rather than receiving it to look like a strike.
Pitchers also find it weird. Some of them have approached Wilson to say that they prefer when a catcher is framing his butt off behind the dish, since it helps them see exactly where their pitches are crossing the plate.
Both points drive at a sort of odd situation that Wilson and the other Southeast League catchers are in. For their current situation, framing pitches is only important in about 1/3 of games. Until the rule is implemented in the levels above them, framing will be important.
And for those already in the majors, like Stallings, all the countless hours spent fine-tuning their framing would be washed away, while things like throwing, blocking and hitting would gain importance within the position.
“I think it would change the game a lot more than people realize,” Stallings said. “Strikes that we aren’t used to having strikes called would be called strikes and I think the pitchers would like it a lot less than they realize. I think it would be really good for offense. I think offense would go up. But then, at the same time, you’d see guys with big curveballs that clip the bottom of the zone that maybe some catchers don’t catch very well, those pitches are called balls, but they would be called strikes.
“It would be weird, but I hope they don’t do it. But it seems like when they want to do something they figure out a way to do it, so we’ll see.”
