99% Invisible - 527- RoboUmp

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

One study from 2018 found that Major League Baseball umpires blow about 14 calls every game. That’s 34,000 bad calls every year. And it makes a difference. A blown strike call can decide a win or a loss, a championship or six months at home, wondering what could have been. And while umpires are about 97% accurate in calling balls and strikes, Major League Baseball has been considering something drastic. Something to take us up to 100% accuracy. They have a plan to replace human umpires with robots.RoboUmp

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you're a baseball fan, you might remember the 1997 playoffs. That's when pitcher Levant Hernandez was unstoppable. Can Levant Hernandez get out of it? Yes he can. Hernandez was a rookie for the Florida Marlins, and his masterpiece was Game 5 of the National League Championship Series against Atlanta.

That's producer Chris Barouba. Levant Hernandez struck out 15 batters that game, which for context is so many batters. It was an incredible night, but a lot of his strikes, they weren't actually strikes. Hernandez was pretty consistently missing the zone This pitch is I would say a foot two feet outside of the strike zone Not close called a strike. That's baseball analyst Katie Nolan. She vividly remembers that game because it really was not good.

I mean, okay, second pitch, way outside called a strike. A Grigis. A Grigis. Cady and I rewatch video from that game with, let's call it a perverse fascination. Almost none of the batters actually swung at his pitches. You see Hernandez just winding up and throwing ball after ball like a foot outside the strike zone. And then, inexplicably, the umpire Eric Greg, he just kept making the hand signal for a strike.

It was so bad. It was probably the worst um, um, um, um, I've, I can remember the outside of this strike zone, um, it just didn't end. It was like a never ending strike zone. In case you don't know anything about baseball, in the major leagues, there are four umpires on the field, one behind each base and one behind home plate. The home plate umpire has the most important job, which is calling balls and strikes. A strike is basically any hitable pitch, something over the plate, between the batter's chest and his knees, and a ball is everything else. I remember watching games as a kid, and whenever an umpire blew it, I would say, I could

do better than that. And so I tried. I was a little league and high school umpire from the age of 14 until my early 20s, and I think I could have gone pro if it weren't for my poor eyesight my aversion to getting yelled at and the time I was hitting the throat by baseball. My point is even in the little leagues getting calls right is a lot harder than it looks. And at the pro level the baseball is moving at like 95 miles an hour. It's kind of incredible that on average umpires get it right about 94 to 97% of the time on strike calls.

And umpires are getting better. The worst umpire today would have been upper tier in 1997. But the crazy high speed to the baseball means, sometimes umpires are going to get it wrong. It just feels to me like it's asking a lot of the umpire to be able to recognize if it nifty inside of the strike zone on its way over the plate or if it didn't. And I know we all make fun of the egregious calls, but I feel like some of them, you're not standing back there, you're not having to do it entirely with your eye, it's got to

be really difficult. One study from 2018 found that umpmpires blow about 14 calls every game. That's 34,000 bad calls every year, and it makes a difference, like in the Levant Hernandez game. The Florida Marlins came out on top, and a few weeks later, they won the World Series. These calls can make all the difference between a win and a loss, a championship, and sitting at home for six months, just wondering what could have been if it only made the right call.

Given the human fallibility of umpires, Major League Baseball has been considering something drastic, something that would take us up to 100% accuracy. They have a plan to replace human umpires with robots. Like any scenario where a human being is being replaced by a robot, there is the question of whether robots can do a better, more accurate job. And in baseball, a sport that is legendary for its quirks and its general human imperfection, there's another trickier question. Is more accurate what we actually want? The idea of replacing an umpire with a machine isn't new. In the 1950s, the Brooklyn Dodgers tested a robot umpire designed by General Electric.

The GE umpire was a big machine, it kind of looked like a barbecue hooked up to a specially tricked out home plate. If the ball cast a shadow over the plate, the machine would light up a big red button, indicating a strike. The trouble is the machine didn't work very well. It made a lot of bad calls, and if it was a night game, the robot umpire just didn't work at all. In the 1950s, the technology just wasn't ready, and the robot umpire went nowhere. For years, the idea seemed like a non-starter. But a few years ago, the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred, said he was considering robot umps for the big leagues.

The robot umpires of the 21st century are a lot more sophisticated than a barbecue. But modern robot umpires, they aren't technically robots. That's what a lot of people picture is, like, you know, boop boop boop boop, kind of a metallic thing behind home plate. What it really is, it's this system. That's Zach Helfent. He's an editor and sports writer at The New Yorker. And today's version of the robot umpire

is actually a series of HD cameras. But for some reason the name Integrated Camera Baseball Tracking System has never caught on. So for this story, we're just going to keep calling them robots. I prefer Robo. I just think Robo sounds better. Baseball won't be the first sport to use Robo's two referee games. In tennis, there's a tracking system called Hawkeye

that can pinpoint whether a ball is in or out of bounds. And it was good. Woo! What a shot. And in soccer, they use motion tracking cameras to help determine off sides and whether the ball has crossed the goal line. And the goal has been disallowed.

In fact, most major league baseball stadiums already have a sophisticated ball tracking system in place. Those were installed in the early 2000s for TV broadcasts to give fans a clear picture of what happened during every pitch. To track things like exit velocity off the bat, how fast the ball is moving off the bat, spin rate, it counts every single revolution of a baseball from when it leaves a pitcher's hand to when it gets

to the plate. So, they have these very sophisticated missile tracking systems, essentially, in ball parks. By the way, he is not exaggerating. This is based on missile tracking technology. If you've watched a baseball game on TV, you've seen this tracking system in action. In Replays, broadcasters will show you charts and scatterplots to lay out where the ball landed inside the strike zone.

But the umpires that people actually making the calls don't have access to this information, only viewers do, which creates some awkward moments for fans. Wait, if we know that's a strike, why is he calling it a ball? It just doesn't make sense. Why doesn't he have the information I have? He should make the right call. But look, baseball is a pretty conservative sport. It's slow to embrace change.

So for now, robot umpires are being tested on the minor leagues to work out some of the kinks and to help fans get used to the whole concept. Since 2019, robot ump technology has been working its way through the minor leagues, where it's called ABS for automatic balls and strikes. Last year, the ABS made its way to AAA, the highest level of minor league baseball. I wanted to see this robot umpire, okay, ABS system, in action. So I bought a ticket to watch some minor league baseball

last summer in fabulous El Paso, Texas, where the hometown chihuahua were taking on the Albuquerque isotopes. But I got COVID, so I had to watch the game at home. The field and the isotopes in position, Riley Smith will start his last eight final warmup tosses before we get underway with tonight's game. Coming into the game, I was worried the baseball experience would feel totally different without

the umpires, because for me, they're essential to the fabric of the game. But actually, I didn't miss the human umpires, because they were still there. Fans here tonight's umpires, behind home plate, is Dylan Wilson, down the first baseline were still there. For those you worried about robots coming for human jobs, at least in this case, the humans are safe. Baseball still needs humans for lots of important jobs, like calling timeouts or cleaning home plate with those tiny adorable brooms. This robot umpire was actually a collaboration between the ABS system that made the call

and the human umpire who set it out loud. I listened with the earpiece along to a minor league game and it's more or less instantaneous. The ball hits the glove, you kind of hear the smack of the ball and the glove, and a split second later, you hear strike or ball. And it's funny, the strike is very peppy. And you know, it sounds very encouraging

and the ball is ball kind of disappointed. It's a man's voice just saying ball of strike. Ball, strike, ball, strike. That's Fred DeJesus. He was actually the first umpire to use the ABS system in 2019. Fun fact, his earpiece is now part of the collection at the baseball Hall of Fame. I obviously couldn't get there as a player, so I made my earpiece made. My joke is six Puerto Ricans have made it and one Puerto Ricans earpiece has made it. Fred says at first, he was wary about the ABS, but he came around pretty quickly. You know, one in Rome, you do what the Romans want.

They wanted you to follow the system. You call it. I know this collaboration sounds, you know, a little ridiculous, but watching the game, I was pleasantly surprised. It was pretty smooth. It didn't look like a game umpired by a sophisticated missile robot. It just looked like a regular afternoon at the ballpark.

And so here's Bernard, right-handed hitter against the lefty groom from the full wind up first pitch. There are no publicly available statistics on the accuracy of the ABS system, but anecdotally, Fred DeJesus says it was pretty damn good. It was very accurate. There were times where you would go, ooo, but again, you did with that machine wanted. There's no dispute here. The ABS is more accurate than a human umpire. Fred says there were some minor glitches when he used it,

but nothing but can't be worked out by the time the system reaches the major leagues. The accuracy thing is huge because there's just so much money on the line. A bad call at the wrong time can ruin a player's career. And sports betting is such a huge industry now. I get why the major leagues want a more accurate system. But a few days after watching the robot umpire in action,

my doubts started to creep back in. Because accuracy isn't everything. Here's Zach Helfend. I don't think most people watch sports to see the fairest or most accurate outcome. For me, the argument comes down to efficiency and accuracy versus charm and drama and dialogue. The thing is, for more than 100 years, baseball has been played by humans and umpired by other humans and in that process, we've introduced lots of small quirks and inefficiencies. For example, baseball stadiums don't have standard dimensions, so a home run at Fenway Park might just be a long flyball at Dodger Stadium.

Baseball just has all these unstandardized things. One of them is the application of the strike zone. Again, the textbook strike zone is supposed to be the player's chest to their knees over the plate. But most human umpires don't exactly follow those guidelines. There's lots of pitches that are considered hittable that don't land inside the textbook strike zone. And human umpires usually call those strikes, but the robot umpire they've been slower to pick that up. In 2019 the ABS system was introduced to the Atlantic League,

and it was programmed to call the textbook strike zone, but most fans and players thought the system felt off. The robot was calling a lot of hitable pitches as balls. So when the strike zone is, you know, so coldly unchanging, that sometimes presents some problems. When the strike zone is smaller than what you're used to, games can drag on. Zach Helfen says the league needed to reprogram the ABS to be less accurate in how it called balls and strikes. They expanded it to about,

maybe an inch or an inch and a half off of the plate, counts as a strike, and that better represented what the real strike zone is. You can program the ABS to call a less accurate game, but you can't program it to do all these other things that human umpires just do instinctively. So I'm gonna let you in on a little dirty baseball secret. Umpires are constantly changing the strike zone

based on context. It's raining, let's move this along. Let's get this over with, or one team is up by a lot. Let's just go home. When a pitcher is struggling, there's a demonstrable effect that the umpire zone gets bigger. Sometimes it gets as much as 50% bigger. That's what they call the compassionate umpire effect. So a pitcher is having a really tough time. We're going to help him out. And they don't do this consciously. When you leave it up to the machines to decide balls and strikes, you're ignoring years of training and experience and intuition that every great umpire has.

And you're taking away one of those small imperfections that makes baseball kind of romantic. There is a trade-off because you do lose this discussion, you do lose these quirks, these injustices, these twists of fate, where someone blinks or gets dirt in their eye and they make a bad call and that changes everything. I want to see how people react to that. We watch baseball to feel something, to divert ourselves. And sometimes it's nice to feel righteously mad against an umpire or to feel like you got away with something. Okay, but let's talk about righteous anger for a minute because Zach is totally right. Yelling at the umpire is a part of the game.

Umpires get yelled at by fans and players and mascots pretty much non-stop because unlike other sports, baseball centers the umpire. The umpire is right behind the plate, making judgment calls on every play. And usually the yelling is fun and cathartic and professional umpires can handle it, but it sucks to experience that. Here's Katie Nolan. Imagine going to work knowing you could get a shard of wood directly into your face, or you could get hit by a 100 mile per hour projectile in the face.

On a on a bad day and on a good, the like ceiling of this job is like you make calls that get people to tell you that you suck at your job and you're the worst and you ruin the game. You know, I've got a video on Instagram right now that's got over 3 million views where the player is saying, Freddie, you're the worst umpire in the league. How did they make you up? Now, he's obviously joking, but this is what the world wants to hear.

They want umpires to be ridiculed. And it's not just ridicule. There are stories of umpires receiving death threats or even being physically assaulted by fans. Tonight, a Staten Island parent coach is accused of punching the umpires so hard empires receiving death threats or even being physically assaulted by fans. Tonight a statinile and parent coach is accused of punching the Empire so hard it left him with a broken jaw. CBS2's Lisa Rosner spoke with friends of the Empire in some respect.

People get carried away and it can get scary. I remembered this little league game where I made a really bad third strike call and after the game, a coach was waiting to yell at me in the parking lot. The abuse is actually the primary reason that I stopped umpiring. And it's why my favorite thing about the robot UPS isn't their accuracy. It's their ability to bring down the temperature. Zach Healthin noticed this too when he saw a robot umpiring person. Fans were a lot less likely to get

into arguments when they knew it was a machine making the calls. Some fans who as as fans do and as this part of the pleasure of baseball were heckling the umpire when I was out there. At one point, one of the fans who did know that they were using real vampires this season in that league pointed up at the hardware above home plate and said, you know, it's not the umpire. This is just the strike zone. And the fan was humiliated in a certain way, very humbled. And was like, you know what, is actually calling a pretty good game.

Watching the isotopes Chihuahua's game, I remember this one at bat. So the Isatops third baseman, Taylor Snyder, was at the plate. Count still one and two. Base is juiced. Here's the pitch. Takes a call third strike breaking ball inside corner. That ends the inning.

Isatops do not score. There was two hits, no way. So the batter Snyder, he disagreed with the call. He thought it was inside, and he was clearly furious. He starts to turn towards the ump and it looks like he is ready to yell, but then he didn't. He stopped himself, and he walked back to the dugout. I've never seen that before. And for me, that's a big plus for the idea of Robot Amps.

Ultimately, the Robot Umpires are coming. They're going to be used in all AAA games this season. Some games will use a full Robot Umpire system, while others will use the Robot Umpire as an appeal system if the player doesn't like a call. Robot Umpires are probably going to show up in the major leagues in the next couple of years, and I know baseball purists are going to be really mad. I get that. I don't love the general idea of robots muscling in on human jobs, but I think I can live with this new technology, because I'm in favor of anything that makes us see umpires as people.

Even if that thing is a robot. More sports talk radio with Chris Baroubaik. Chris, I am so sorry, you didn't get to see those minor league baseball games this summer because of COVID. That's terrible. Thank you. I know it's like my favorite thing to do every summer is to go see some minor league baseball.

And I used to go see the Brooklyn Cyclones all the time who play down at Cody Island. And they have a roller coaster and left field because the stadium is right next to the amusement park down there. And I remember one time I went and I asked somebody at the stadium, like, well, what happens if they hit a home run into the roller coaster? Like, you know, aren't you worried about that? And he's like, it's never happened. It were not that all right about that. I mean, I just love all these minor league baseball team names. The Brooklyn Cyclone, it's such a great name. I know.

I kind of love how ridiculous they are. Like we mentioned the Albuquerque Isotopes, which that one's actually a Simpson's joke. Yeah, I was wondering that. So that started as a Simpson's joke and then became real and real. That's right. So the Springfield Isotopes is the team the Simpsons because Homer Simpson works at a

nuclear power plant. And there's an episode where they threaten to move to Albuquerque. And then the real life Albuquerque team was like, ha, ha, ha, that's funny. We're just going to adopt that as our team name. That's awesome. I love that. I love that one too. I beat the ridiculous team name thing.

So that's actually a pretty recent thing in minor league baseball. So in the past, there used to be this convention where the minor league team would share a name with the major league team they were affiliated with. So say you have the New York Mets, they have a minor league team. It's called the Binghamton Mets, for example. Right.

But in the 21st century, we've seen this big craze of picking more distinct, more ridiculous names. So in 2016, the Binghamton Metz became the Binghamton Rumble ponies, for example. Okay. I think my favorite of this is the Rocket City trash bandas, which are even on the little Vaman. That's a pretty good one. It's so good. I mean, there's so I love so many of them. Like the Hartford Yard Goats is a favorite of mine. The Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, the Akron Rubber Decks, the Amarillo Saud Poodles. I like the, it's a long list.

Wait, what's a Saud Poodle? It's a Prairie Dog. I think their logo is like a Prairie Dog with a cowboy hat. Oh, that, of course, that makes sense. So why are there so many like this? And why is this kind of a recent phenomenon? So the reason that there's so ridiculous is because you sell a lot more merch this way. So if your team name is the Binghamton Metz, for example, if somebody wants a Metz hat, they're going to get the New York Metz, right?

They're not going to get the second level minor league team. But if your name is the Rumble ponies, you get all this free publicity. Like that was written up in the New York Times when they changed the name. Their whole thing is like, look, you don't have a huge budget for publicity. This is free publicity. Just go with it and, you know, unashamedly take on the ridiculous name. I guess that makes a lot of sense. I mean, but do the old school, you know, minor league baseball fans today like this? Oh no. I mean, baseball fans were way too serious, right? So you can get used to anything, I think, but a lot of them don't like it

because of the random word generator quality to some of these, like Akron Rubberducks feels like you put it into an AI and we're like, come up with a silly name and they did it. Yeah. But the really good ones, they actually aren't random. Like usually there is something interesting and local that the name is rooted in. Oh, so what's what are some good examples of that? Okay, let's go through

the list. Credit to baseball writer Matt Snyder, who wrote about this last year is very helpful for my research. Hopefully this will make you appreciate these ridiculous minor league baseball team names. Okay. Hartford Yard Goats. There are not goats wandering the yards of Connecticut. That's not what it's a reference to. The stadium where they play is built on an old rail yard, and a yard goat is a vehicle for moving cars around in a rail yard. So it's a reference to the geography of the stadium. Oh, why didn't know that? But the meaning is somewhat obscured by the fact that I think their logo is a goat though, right? Like an actual goat. Yeah, their logo is actually like a goat snapping a baseball bat and half of the sea. Okay.

Binghamton, Rubble ponies. Binghamton is the carousel capital of the United States, self-described, but that's why it's a reference to like this interesting local quirk. The iron pigs, the I Valley, of course, is in Pennsylvania. That's a state with a huge steel industry, and pig iron is the material that comes out of a blast furnace that you then have to refine to make steel. So it's actually like a reference to local industry. Love it.

And then my favorite, the El Paso Chihuahua's. So El Paso, Texas is, it's right on the border with Mexico, and the Mexican state of Chihuahua is right across the Rio Grande. So it's a nod to the really significant Mexican influence on the city. And nothing to do with little dogs. I mean, they're logo once again, their logo is a little dog. It is not a map with like El Paso and like the Rio Grande Valley or anything. So I mean, my point is the next time someone says like, oh, that's so random, like, where did they come up with these names? Like, it's not random. Like, there is something

local about these names, which I prefer to more serious names that are kind of generic, that don't have anything to do with the place where the team is playing. So say the Grizzlies, the Eagles, you know, or, you know, like in other sports, like the Utah jazz where our franchise moves to a place that once had meaning, but then, you know, the meaning is no longer relevant to the place that they land or the Utah jazz used to be the New Orleans jazz, and then they just moved the team and the name exactly. Exactly. That was so lazy.

They couldn't even come up with a different team name because yeah, with all the respect to Utah, not the same rich jazz heritage as a New Orleans. I think we're safe to say that. Yeah, I think we're safe to say that. Well, thank you for this tour of minor league baseball team names. I actually really do appreciate how strange and cool. And now, appreciate how local they are and specifically are. So thanks for that. Of course, thank you, Roman. 99% of us will produce this week by Chris Baroube, edited by Kelly Prime, sound mix by Martin Gonzales, music by Swan Rial, fact checking by Graham Haysha. Delaney Hall is our senior editor, Kurt Colstedt,

is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Jason Dillion, Lashemadon, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. The 99% of the logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. Special thanks this week to Bobby Lord, Matt Schultz, Rick White,

and all the baseball umpires we spoke to for this story. And thank you to Zach Helfen, who was also very, very helpful. You can read his reporting on robot umpires in the New Yorker. 99% of his book is part of the Stitcher and Serious XM podcast family. Now, hit quartered six blocks north in the Pandora building.

And beautiful. Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. For our Instagram, Reddit and TikTok too. You can find links to others to share shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org. Music you