Major League Baseball is making a key change to umpiring this season, which will allow batters and pitchers to be able to challenge balls and strikes. It’s a technology-aided innovation many have been clamoring for. Unfortunately, it now looks like it’s going to be accompanied by a change that will actively make watching the game on television slightly worse.
Starting next season, broadcasters will no longer be allowed to indicate whether a pitch was technically a ball or strike within the strike zone box. According to The Chicago Sun-Times, they’ll still show where the pitch was relative to the strike zone box, but there won’t be any difference in how it’s displayed to indicate whether it should have been called a ball or strike. In addition, all displays within the stadium, such as on the Jumbotron or inside the dugouts, won’t show the strike zone box at all.
Here’s a look at the strike zone box from a game last season. This pitch was technically outside the box; so, it appears as a circle without the center filled in. If it were within the strike zone, it would have the center filled in…
The thought process here is they don’t want batters or pitchers to be able to know in advance whether a challenge will be decided in their favor. The decision needs to be made almost immediately; so, to exploit it at scale, there would likely need to be someone the batter or pitcher would look to that would be watching a monitor that could signal immediately whether to challenge or not. Major League Baseball has had teams caught tipping signs in the past; so, there’s a lot of sensitivity around ways this could be exploited, given people will literally cheat at anything.
Even with those concerns, however, this makes no sense whatsoever. Any change that makes the viewing experience for fans even slightly less desirable is dumb, given the revenue upside. Broadcasts should continually be getting better and better, not intentionally making themselves worse because of concerns about how teams could exploit it. Besides, given the circle is still there, people can use their eyes to tell with 99% accuracy whether the pitch was inside or outside.
And even if teams did exploit it, so what? The only way you can challenge a call and succeed is if the umpire literally gets it wrong. Every single sport has an employee watching a live feed and messaging if something got screwed up. Why is it such an affront to the game if players are challenging correct calls and holding off on challenging incorrect calls? We should all want as many of the calls to be correct as possible.
We have no idea what video replay is going to look like a year from now. MLB is clearly trying things out this season, and adjustments will be made to make it work better and more seamlessly moving forward. We may even get all strikes and balls called by robots at some point in the future. I’m not really sure of the specifics, but I am sure that whatever MLB settles on long-term won’t involve making the fan experience even slightly worse.
