SAN RAFAEL, Calif.—It turns out 21st-century baseball with a computer calling balls and strikes feels a lot like 20th-century baseball (you know, with a human behind the plate). There appear to be two main differences. The first and most obvious is volume. Machines just aren’t good at giving that classic umpire grunt, so you still need a warm body to do it.
The second? Accuracy. “You face [Hall of Fame pitcher] Greg Maddux, and he’d get a foot off the plate,” recalls Eric Byrnes, former Oakland A’s player, and current baseball analyst. “So if we have a chance to get it right if we have a chance to get a pitch every time, why would we not?” Byrnes was the man behind Tuesday night’s historic technological feat. On a picturesque evening in Marin County just north of San Francisco, the San Rafael Pacifics faced off against the Vallejo Admirals in what was billed as the first professional baseball game to be called by a piece of technology rather than a person. In this minor league showdown, the role of the balls-and-strikes umpire was played by a mounted three-camera tracking setup synced with a computer.
(Two of the cameras are mounted at each end of the upper corner of the grandstands behind the plate; the third sits in center field.) Together, the devices comprise a system better known by its commercial moniker: Pitchf/x. It was soon dubbed #RoboUmp on Twitter. “I’m not looking to eliminate any umpires, not one. If anything, we’re essentially going to add an umpire,” Byrnes noted. Accordingly, there were still two standard umpires on the field and another behind the plate. That’s the standard setup of the Pacific Association of Professional Baseball Clubs, an independent league in the San Francisco Bay Area (it’s considered a Single A equivalent). But rather than his usual duties, the home plate umpire largely remained silent, only calling foul balls and any potential plays at the plate.
Byrnes, for his part, gave the technology a voice. Mic’d up during the game; he’d grunt “STRIIIIKE” with an umpire’s gusto and flatly call “ball” with every outside pitch. And unlike a traditional umpire, Byrnes could occasionally let some personality in. “Just caught the outside corner, dude, and I’m talking just nicked it.” Vallejo Admiral’s third baseman Joshua Wong told Ars that he was encouraged by the Pitchf/x tests he saw before the game. “I feel like it speeds the game up more. It gets the hitters to swing at more pitches,” he said. “It’s good for the game. Just being more accurate and having better calls is going to help us more.”
MINISTRY OF INNOVATION / BUSINESS OF TECHNOLOGY
For the first time, sensors and a computer play umpire in a pro baseball game.
Pitchf/x, a system you may have seen on ESPN, gives the home plate ump an easy night.
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By Cyrus Farivar – Jul 29, 2015 3:58 am UTC
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Eric Brynes watches the pitch monitor on a screen from behind the home plate.
Cyrus Farivar
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SAN RAFAEL, Calif.—It turns out 21st-century baseball with a computer calling balls and strikes feels a lot like 20th-century baseball (you know, with a human behind the plate). There appear to be two main differences. The first and most obvious is volume. Machines just aren’t good at giving that classic umpire grunt, so you still need a warm body to do it.
The second? Accuracy. “You face [Hall of Fame pitcher] Greg Maddux, and he’d get a foot off the plate,” recalls Eric Byrnes, former Oakland A’s player, and current baseball analyst. “So if we have a chance to get it right if we have a chance to get a pitch every time, why would we not?” Byrnes was the man behind Tuesday night’s historic technological feat. On a picturesque evening in Marin County just north of San Francisco, the San Rafael Pacifics faced off against the Vallejo Admirals in what was billed as the first professional baseball game to be called by a piece of technology rather than a person. In this minor league showdown, the role of the balls-and-strikes umpire was played by a mounted three-camera tracking setup synced with a computer.
(Two of the cameras are mounted at each end of the upper corner of the grandstands behind the plate; the third sits in center field.) Together, the devices comprise a system better known by its commercial moniker: Pitchf/x. It was soon dubbed #RoboUmp on Twitter. “I’m not looking to eliminate any umpires, not one. If anything, we’re essentially going to add an umpire,” Byrnes noted. Accordingly, there were still two standard umpires on the field and another behind the plate. That’s the standard setup of the Pacific Association of Professional Baseball Clubs, an independent league in the San Francisco Bay Area (it’s considered a Single A equivalent). But rather than his usual duties, the home plate umpire largely remained silent, only calling foul balls and any potential plays at the plate.
Byrnes, for his part, gave the technology a voice. Mic’d up during the game; he’d grunt “STRIIIIKE” with an umpire’s gusto and flatly call “ball” with every outside pitch. And unlike a traditional umpire, Byrnes could occasionally let some personality in. “Just caught the outside corner, dude, and I’m talking just nicked it.” Vallejo Admiral’s third baseman Joshua Wong told Ars that he was encouraged by the Pitchf/x tests he saw before the game. “I feel like it speeds the game up more. It gets the hitters to swing at more pitches,” he said. “It’s good for the game. Just being more accurate and having better calls is going to help us more.”
Cyrus Farivar
Former Oakland A’s player Eric Brynes acted as the human voice of the computer-called balls and strikes.
Old tech, a new experiment
Pitchf/x isn’t a invention. It has been in use behind the scenes for a decade to record both the precise location and trajectory of pitches. It’s already used in all 30 Major League Baseball parks for analytics purposes and online and television broadcasts. If you’ve seen a Sunday Night Baseball game on ESPN, you’re familiar with Pitchf/x’s work. (A predecessor system by a now-defunct company, whose product was called PitchTrax, debuted as far back as 2002.)
In many ways, Major League Baseball has historically been averse to adding technology. Unlike other sports that have embraced computers or cameras for scoring confirmation or play reviews, MLB instant replay only debuted in full during the 2014 season. But when it comes to utilizing a RoboUmp for something as integral to the game as pitcher-hitter interactions, technology must cope with uncertainty. Consider MLB’s inherently relative definition of the strike zone:
The STRIKE ZONE is that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball. In other words, it’s roughly the space over the plate measured from the armpits or letters across a player’s chest to the knees. It literally changes from hitter to hitter. And as any good pitcher knows, it may slightly change with every umpire. Identifying where that space is in a split second, particularly in the lower or higher corners, is more art than science. Catchers also play a role by attempting to frame a pitch by quickly adjusting their gloves after the catch to indicate to the umpire that the ball was, in fact, caught in the zone.
Umpires do their best, but they make mistakes. Heckling and coaches’ arguments wouldn’t be part of the game if they were perfect every time. For its part, Pitchf/x’s hardware defines a strike as any ball that touches the strike zone—which likely means that some players won’t like what they saw thrown at them. “I’m sure many people around baseball will be watching the debut of this new system to see how it goes,” Jacob Pomrenke, a producer at the Society for American Baseball Research, e-mailed Ars. “There will always be some kinks to work out and it will be intriguing to see how the players respond (especially to calls they don’t like!).
The idea of using an automated system to call balls and strikes has been talked about for years. It’ll be nice to finally have a real-life example to see how it works at the professional. However, there are still many factors that would have to go into implementing this type of system at a major league or the affiliated minor-league level. This is a system that is very dependent on precise technology, and even the Pitchf/x system that MLB has used for nearly a decade now continues to have hiccups and glitches that require human intervention.”
Pomrenke pointed out that most problems the software have had been relatively minor. Grantland outlined a few such errors from this exact setup in 2013, and most had to do with miscalibration. For sensors and software to replace human umps, fans and the MLB would have to be “willing to accept a much smaller amount of inexplicable error in exchange for a larger amount of explicable error,” Dan Brooks, founder of Pitchf/x repository and BrooksBaseball.net, told Grantland at the time.
