DrungoHazewood

Don't paint with such broad strokes. There's some automation in car manufacturing. Ford might use a line that's 90% automated and 10% manual intervention. Morgan probably is 90% manual and 10% automated. We currently have a process with balls and strikes that's 100% manual. A person QA'ing the strike zone boundaries defined by image recognition software in real time is more like the 90% solution. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. A solution doesn't have to be some kind of philosophical ideal to have value.

You mean the tops and bottoms? With image recognition software that figures out where knees and letters are, probably QA'd by humans as the game progresses.

So? Why is that a problem? I'd much rather have someone click a pointer on the guy's letters to define the top of a strike zone than have the ump calling 10% of balls strikes. Defining a batter's zone is far less subjective than guessing balls and strikes. There are different levels of human subjectivity and automation in processes, and with free will we can decide what makes sense.

A set strike zone would favor certain types of players. I don't think that's a good thing. Diversity of player types is a good thing.

Yea, don't overthink this. You don't need sensors. Pitch f/x type data is fine.

It's ridiculous. Gausman throwing gas, gets several Ks that are turned into non-Ks by bad umpiring, and the O's losing. Bring on the robot umps. Any day would be fine.

Just a made-up number based on the data I've seen that can interpreted as about 10% of pitches are rulebook strikes called balls and vice versa.

For 130 years nobody could do anything about bad umpiring. Now we can. To me it all comes down to the fact that today everyone knows about a bad call within seconds and you can't just leave that hanging out there. It's an elephant in the room. It will not be long before an ump calls a pitch 8" off the plate strike three with the tying run on third in the 9th in October, and it'll be all anyone talks about for months.

I'm all for incentivizing performance. But I'm not sure drawing a line between 88% accuracy and 88.3% accuracy on called ball/strikes and demoting everyone below the line (and taking at least a year long 80% pay cut*) would have the intended effect. I'd guess a substantial fraction of promoted umps would fall below the threshold, and as a group they might be worse than the demoted umps. I'd rather just take the umps out of ball/strike calls for the most part and give them electronic aids. * I'm assuming AAA umps make a small fraction of what MLB umps do, similar to players, but I don't know that for sure.

What I'm saying is that threats like firing 1/3rd of your employees each year might work on McDonalds employees or something, but probably have a lot of negative consequences among high-skill jobs. What you might find is that the spread in talent/performance in MLB umps is tight enough that how you implement your measurements becomes more important than performance. It's likely that you already have a very high performing group up umps and that all your system will do is cause bitterness and discontent as an almost random group gets axed every year.

Or you'll quickly find out that it wasn't poor umps so much as a nearly impossible task. What would happen if the bottom 33% of MLB rosters were banished at the end of each year? My guess is a small but noticeable decline in MLB talent.

Isn't baseball known for its ability to quickly and proactively address obvious problems?

I think it's nearly certain, and umps guessing and missing 10% of pitches and making up their own strike zones will be one of those things we laugh about the old days.

Rule 2.00- Definition of Terms 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.

I once read someone argue that the game needs injustice meted out from on high to really be poetic and tragic and meaningful. I think that's a load of crap.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks some curmudgeons pushed to implement replay in an NFL-challenge way so that it would be clunky and they eventually do away with it. Another part of me says they just lacked imagination and took the What Would The NFL Do path of least resistance. The obvious way to help with balls and strikes is a real-time indicator that only the home plate ump is privy to, indicating if it was a strike. We'll see if they do something more ill-conceived.

Yea, the only two possible choices are a room of clones simulating all the games in a Google datacenter, or playing the game exactly like it was in 19-and-aught-five.

You'll lose a lot more fans by telling them that it's okay that the folks on the field are the only ones who can't know the right call. It's become untenable to have millions of fans see a clearly wrong call in real time and no one can do nothing about it. Not using electronic aids would be like handing out speeding tickets based solely on the cops' judgment, when there's a radar gun sitting on the seat next to him. Yes, there needs to be consideration about flow of the game, but this ain't soccer. Baseball naturally has a discrete, segmented rhythm with dozens of pauses and breaks.

Do you remember Ron Luciano? He was like Leslie Nielsen with the dial turned back three notches. In his autobiography he claimed he threw Earl out of several games just for fun, before he'd even done anything.

Nicknames meant a lot more before television, when they added some bit of color to a guy you may never see outside of a black-and-white newspaper photograph. And before standards of journalism did away with most beat writer embellishment and flowery Victorian verbiage. Most modern nicknames seem kind of contrived, although The Commerce Comet and the Old Woman in the Red Cap may have once thought the same thing.

Wait... what? Have you heard something?

I'd like the next CBA to just state that you become a free agent after six years of service time, or after your age 28 season (or maybe 27, I haven't totally thought this through), whichever is first. So for most players who come up at 23 or 24 or 25 it would incentivize putting them in the majors as soon as they're ready to play any kind of role. No more games, just put your best players out there, with a few exceptions. No, this is not going to happen. But I believe the NHL does do something like this.

I know this will get little, if any, traction here, but I think the poll numbers reflect this a lot better than the post-trade hand-wringing: Parra had every expectation of being an average MLB outfielder filling a sub-replacement hole, while Davies was in a fairly tight grouping with Wright and Wilson as potential future backend starters. I thought it was justifiable, the Orioles were in a spot where a win or two was conceivably the difference between the playoffs and not. Much of the hate and discontent* comes from the fact that Parra had a near .900 OPS in Milwaukee, but a .625 for the Orioles. * Exempting Can_of_corn, who had an intense fear and loathing of the trade from day one for mostly ideological reasons.

Greenland. Or maybe Madagascar. Still islands, unlike Australia.