Why Won’t Baseball Let Us Submit to Our Robot Overlords?

Can't ONE THING in the Trump era be objective?

Image generated by DallE-3.

I’m a bit of an AI skeptic. Maybe one day AI will take our jobs and shag our wives, but right now, AI thinks that Shrek and the Mona Lisa are twins and feels that “click on the bicycles” is some unsolvable mystic riddle. I’ve tried to get AI to write comedy, but it appears to have been trained on a group of wacky dads cracking wise at a church picnic.

One type of AI clearly works, though: Baseball’s Automated Balls-Strike System (ABS). For non baseball fans: Calling balls and strikes has been a contentious issue since baseball was invented by Jesus in 1776. It has caused more grown men to lose their shit than kids horsing around in the back seat and U-Haul customer service combined. For most of baseball history, arguments over balls and strikes were unsolvable, because as soon as the call was made, the event entered the Realm Of The Unprovable, where the informed opinions of intelligent adults have the same weight as the idiotic ramblings of people who make the “DO NOT EAT” warning on silica packets necessary.

But in recent years, baseball developed ABS to accurately call balls and strikes. It’s a lot like systems used in tennis and soccer, where cameras show the ball’s exact path, which prevents situations like England and Germany almost rebooting World War II after a disputed goal in the 1966 World Cup final. ABS is part of virtually every baseball broadcast, and it confirms what baseball fans have long suspected: Umpires are incompetent assholes who are part of a global conspiracy to undermine our favorite team and crush any glimmer of joy in our lives. Or at least: That’s how it seems sometimes.

Major League Baseball experimented with ABS during spring training this year, and used it again this week at the All-Star Game. Personally, I loved it; it helped get the big decisions right. MLB used a “challenge” system that I thought was overly elaborate, but even that had an upside: A player could basically tell an umpire “you’re wrong, motherfucker,” and then ABS would show the pitch on the Jumbotron, so the whole stadium got to share in the triumphant moment when a 50-foot screen told the ump: “CONFIRMED: YOU’RE WRONG, MOTHERFUCKER.”

But baseball doesn’t use ABS during the regular season, and may or may not use it in the future. Balls and strikes are still called by humans, just like they were back when the gloves were pigs’ bladders stuffed with hay and starting pitchers only left the game if they died of typhoid. Of course, the broadcast still shows every bad call, so it’s really the worst of all worlds: Umpires can screw your team, and you can quantify the exact amount that the ups are screwing them. Rage over a bad call used to be tempered by your internal voice that said “you are often wrong,” but now your fury is backed by evidence that would stand up in court.

This frustrates the hell out of me. I keep thinking: Can’t one thing in my life be settled objectively? Can’t there be one area where a terrible decision made by a moron doesn’t become my problem? For baseball to show me that a better way exists and then yoink it away has bothered me more than I expected, and at first I didn’t know why. Initially, I thought maybe it was because I’m in my 40s, so I’ve reached the age where I’m biologically programmed to declare fatwas in response to petty slights. Next, I thought that the umps might – as impossible as it might seem – actually be getting worse; they did recently call a five-pitch walk on Seth Brown, after all. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that neither of those things is the problem. The problem is this particular moment in time; not having ABS stings more in the post-truth age.

The splintering of media has reduced the number of agreed-upon facts. Social media lets people shop for whichever reality they prefer, and the president lies so much that it seems like he must get credit card points for each lie that he tells. We used to debate things like whether the Beatles or Rolling Stones were better, or whether the frog-on-pig relationship in The Muppets is weird; now, we debate facts, like who won the 2020 election and whether obesity is bad for your health. We can’t have sane conversations because we can’t agree on one fixed point in the universe – and even mentioning the universe will probably cause someone to pop up and say “THE ‘UNIVERSE’ WAS INVENTED BY THE ILLUMINATI AND EDWIN HUBBLE TO SELL TELESCOPES!!!”

And that, I think, is why baseball not using ABS feels like a particularly sharp burr in the anus. So much of the world is unfixable; I certainly don’t know how to make things less crazy. But one small problem that could be solved, so I really, really want it to be solved. I want one foundational truth in this unstable world. And I want that one foundational truth to be that this pitch is a goddamned motherfucking strike:

THAT IS A STRIKE, FOLKS!!! That is a steeeeeeeerike! I don’t understand quantum physics or the metric system, I don’t know how they built Stonehenge and claymation frightens me, but I know that if it’s not 0-1 after that pitch, then any claims of justice in the universe are a perverted joke. There is one small realm where objective truth can reign – so please, Major League Baseball, let it! And if you can do it before C.B. Bucknor works a game for my team again, then even better.

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