The punchline to the old joke about how to make love to a porcupine is ‘carefully’. And you give the same answer if someone asks you how to bring officiating technology into sport.
And while the robots aren’t quite trundling across the diamond, they have arrived.
Major League Baseball’s Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System lands this season as the sport’s answer to a question it has been circling for years: how do you bring accuracy into officiating? And guess how they are doing it…
To say carefully is not the same as saying tentatively. Umpires continue to call balls and strikes exactly as they always have. Nothing will change at the point of delivery but what does change is what happens next; pitchers, catchers, and batters can now formally challenge a call, triggering a real-time review powered by Hawk-Eye. This is not a new partnership, the stars at Sony have been responsible for the same multi-camera tracking technology that has been mapping pitches in MLB stadiums since 2014. Each team gets two challenges per game, with only incorrect ones reducing your challenge total.
As with most successful forms of officiating tech, results are public. Reviews and the verdict will appear on stadium video boards and feeds directly into the broadcast with fans in the stands and at home seeing the same thing. That transparency is deliberate and provides it’s a visible, legible process playing out in real time.
Hawk-Eye is undoubtedly accurate enough to replace humans but the MLB has probably been sensitive to a few things. There have been some painful lessons learned in football, cricket, and tennis with elsewhere with wholesale introductions creating friction with players, fans, and those responsible for installation.
There are many moving parts to this type of step change and let’s not forget, some of the best theatre in baseball is the interaction between an aggrieved player and the umpire. The MLB enjoys a rich heritage which carries a lot of emotion, so keeping the robots behind the scenes for now might be smartest step in this smart tech move.
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