Electronic Umpires: The Future of Professional Baseball?

Aaah, baseball. America's pastime. Blue skies, green grass, dirt, wood, leather, and horsehide. A relaxing afternoon of pitching, hitting, running, catching, throwing, and sliding. All set into poetic motion and carried out under the watchful eyes of ...electronic gadgets?!

We increasingly live in a world dominated by gee-whiz electronic gizmos. Lasers, sensors, scanners, and cameras, all around us. Watching, calculating, monitoring, adjusting, displaying. Looking forward, these ever smaller, smarter, and more powerful automated doo-dads will pervade our society to a greater and greater degree. Even in the grand old game of baseball, umpires could soon become a thing of the past, sent out to pasture by, you guessed it, electronics.

And it has already started. Within just the past few years, Major League Baseball (MLB) installed an electronic system, known as Questec, at several ballparks to monitor the strike zone. The resulting ball/strike information, however, was not made immediately available as a bona fide part of the game, but was simply used later to help measure the flesh-and-blood umpires' performances. Also, in late August 2008, MLB installed cameras and replay systems in every ballpark to aid umpire calls on home runs at the fence-fair or foul, over the fence or not. This instant replay system was immediately incorporated directly into the game: the head ump simply trots over to his video replay monitor and checks the playback from every camera angle, then renders the verdict. OUTTA HERE! No more controversial home run calls. The obvious questions for MLB looking ahead are how far and how fast will electronic umpire thingamajigs go?

One can easily imagine a day in the not too distant future when umpires will be replaced completely by a super-sophisticated electronics system under the watchful eye of a single computer-electronics-laser gadget geek tucked away in some windowless bowel of the ballpark. The old Questec system could be perfected for calling balls and strikes in real time, immediately displaying the determination on the scoreboard. The system's programmers and builders could even add an artificial audio umpire personality. Pop! The ball hits the catcher's mitt, the lasers do their measurements, the computers their calculations, and the P.A. system could yell "Steerrriiike threeee."

Of course, to monitor accurately the other, rather more complicated parts of the game, like tags, catches, infield fly rule, balks, and the like, tiny sensors, transmitters, lasers and cameras will have to be placed everywhere. In the balls, bats, uniforms, gloves, bases, and all over the field. And computer-generated fake umpire voices will instantaneously have to bark out their bits-and-bytes-generated calls over the loudspeakers for play to proceed uninterrupted.

Sure, initially it would be expensive and complicated, given all the myriad possibilities of calls and plays which would have to monitored and perfected. Yet, 20 years ago, who would have believed that we'd now be able to watch TV on a pocket-sized phone? Certainly an undertaking such as the game of baseball could be completely digitized with a reasonable effort. In fact, already U.S. patent applications are being filed to accomplish these very things. Examples of patents already granted include: US 5401016 "Automatic baseball ball and strike indicator" using ultrasonic transducers, and US 5676607 "Laser beam strike zone indicators."

Why bother, you ask? To remove all umpire-related controversy from the game. Currently, on every pitch, tag, or hit that's now judged by an umpire, 50 percent of those involved are automatically unhappy if the call goes against them, often vehemently so. Should the umpire's call come at an important juncture, the very outcome of the game can rest on his imperfect judgement. Players' and coaches' salaries and careers, huge betting dollars, teams' destinies, and cities' economies rely on the umps getting it right. With so much at stake, it's easy to see why emotions run so high on every controversial umpire's call. Replace the umps with unfeeling, impartial, and unblinking electronic whatchamacallits and all the controversies would disappear. Baseball would become rather like a human video game, where players run around in a field of invisible streams of ones and zeros. But at least those cyberspace bits and bytes would get the calls right.

How would the players and fans react to this ultra-modern, electronic baseball game without umps? Without a doubt, this game would be a sterile, less emotional shell of its former self. Once the system's bugs are worked out and the perfected form instituted, the electronic calls would be black vs. white, with no gray area, since the redundant network of sensors would be incapable of making a mistake. The computers would have checked and rechecked the data 1000 times in the nanosecond after something happened. The lights in the scoreboard and an electronic voice over the P.A. system would coolly and calmly announce the outcomes.

There would be no more yelling, cussing, throwing dirt at the umps or getting tossed out of games for disagreeing with the calls. No one would need to jump up and down, vein-popping mad after a call, screaming and spewing expletives, since there would be no more bad calls. The laws of physics and electromagnetics do not lie. Mathematical graphs plotting the sensor-laden ball's position and the time it hit the first baseman's sensor-laden mitt could be superimposed on the batter's position and the time his sensor-laden foot struck the sensor-laden base. The graph on the centerfield Jumbotron scoreboard would emotionlessly display that the runner was out by 0.0756 of a second. There would be nothing to argue. The only rational conclusions after every call would be "I didn't get it done" or "hats off to my honorable opponent." Sportsmanship would certainly improve, since there should be no irate responses to the cold hard irrefutable facts. Losers would have to tip their helmets to the victors, congratulating them for "winning one for the Gipper."

The bottom line, however, for MLB to consider, is whether anybody would pay to watch the games in such an electronic era? Without the emotions and uncertainty hinging on every call, would the game still be entertaining? At its core, professional baseball is just that, entertainment. And without the convenient scapegoat of blaming a loss on lousy umpiring, what would players, coaches, and fans have to gripe about? Americans do love to gripe.

Would baseball be a better game without umpires? I think not. Blown calls and all, let's keep the umpires and emotion in baseball. Batting helmets slammed in disgust after a questionable call, bases tossed, and coaches going berserk and hurling colorful insults an inch from umps' faces are part of what keeps the game entertaining. The game is much richer when pitchers and batters have to guess if a close pitch will be called a strike or a ball.

In defense of the flesh-and-blood umpires, could a bits-and-bytes series of one and zero impulses call a rainout, or restore order after a spikes-up slide or a beanball-induced bench-clearing brawl? Would a Robo-Ump take a leisurely stroll to the mound as a courtesy after the catcher just took a bouncing slider under the cup or the batter fouled one off his shin? Can Cyber-Ump throw new balls back to the pitcher? Toss out a scuffed ball? Or check a suspect ball for a foreign substance and throw the guilty pitcher out of the game? Will Electro-Ump be able to really sell the call after a close play, lustily ringing up a batter on a two out bases-loaded third strike? And could a fully electronic, never erring, crash-proof, fully cognizant techno-umpire system really be built to begin with?

I say, God bless the umps, warts, questionable vision, and all, and keep them and the game as it was meant to be-grass and dirt stained and electronic gizmo-free.