The robots are coming! The robots are coming!
For most of my life, I was a baseball traditionalist.
That is to say, from my earliest memories of the game until I took my first steps into covering the Colorado Rockies as a career, my opinions on certain divisive topics in MLB fell on one predictable side.
I didn’t like the Designated Hitter. Make pitchers stand up there, too. Strikeouts drive me insane and I pine for the days of the slappy-contact hitter. Starting pitchers should throw deeper into games, I would say. If you don’t like the shift, then hit the ball the other way. And let the “human element” of missed calls add to the drama of the game.
Through various conversations and debates over the last 13 years, I have changed my mind about all of that. But none more than that last one.
In a true “no zealot like a convert” move, I became an extreme adopter of an electronic strike zone. The mountain of evidence showing how many calls are missed each game grew too high to ignore. It became clear that the game could be improved dramatically by using technology to get the call right rather than for us to all complain about after the fact.
So, for over a decade, I campaigned through articles and podcasts and to anyone within earshot. Baseball would be better with an automated strike zone. For a while, it was an uphill battle. It sure felt like a losing one.
There’s no point in relitigating all the arguments at this point. My side won. Well… kinda. In 2026, MLB is getting dragged kicking and screaming into the future. Barely.
The robots are coming! The robots are coming!
As you have almost certainly heard by now, this will be the first season with a new system. So, of course, we are using the technology to simply get the calls right. Right? Well, no, not really.
Perhaps as an attempt to placate the skeptics or perhaps in an attempt to protect the umpires, MLB has decided to make getting calls right into a silly little game. Each team gets two challenges. Except that each team has infinite challenges. As long as they win the challenge.
This is, almost by definition, a half-measure. Make no mistake, it’s better than before. We now have at least one path toward corrected mistakes that the umpires make. It’s just such a silly path. But I also think it is going to become clear within the first few weeks how often the gamesmanship of guessing is overshadowing the process of making better calls.
We will see situations where a team runs out of challenges in the first few innings only to see the game swing on a bad call later in the game when they were out of challenges. Games will unfold where both teams use up their challenges early before a stream of bad calls later.
Statistics show us that between 12-14 pitches are missed each game, meaning that unless the players bat near 1.000 on their challenges, a lot of calls are still going to get missed. Even players with the best “feel for the zone” aren’t going to be perfect. They have to take an educated guess. When they are wrong, they will get far more scrutiny than the umpires do.
Postgame analysis of missed calls will now focus on whether or not players implemented good strategy with their challenges. Some of that will be pretty fun. Ok, I’ll admit. A lot of that will be a lot of fun.
But don’t let it mask the more important point. The responsibility for whether a call is correct or not is on the umpire, not the player. Otherwise, what are they getting paid for?
In the long run, I suspect this era of the strike zone will be looked back on as a brief and bizarre one. Before too long, we will see that this was a band aid on an open wound. It’s better than nothing but we have the tools to heal it entirely and are simply choosing not to use them. Or, at least, not all of them. The data will continue to pile up. The debate, sadly, is not yet quite over. This is only the beginning.
Eventually, the tech will take over and we will get all of the calls right instead of just the ones that require a little guessing game.
In other words, this is just the first wave. Not all of them are here but… the robots are coming.
One if a strike, and two if a ball
And I behind the plate shall call
The correct call for all to see
So on a mistake, the game will not swing
And all who bought tickets will stand and cheer
For a fairer game comes to your town this year.
The robots are coming! The robots are coming!
