I Welcome Baseball’s New Robot Overlords

By Jacob Weindling | September 25, 2025 | 1:33pm

Photo by Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA

Sports Major League Baseball

I Welcome Baseball’s New Robot Overlords

Major League Baseball introduced a big rule change this week, as balls and strikes can be challenged starting next year, with teams getting two challenges that they only lose should they get it wrong. The minor leagues have been using this challenge system, and MLB tried it in spring training this year, and it has worked smoothly and quickly. The hope is that this can help reduce the number of bad calls that swing outcomes without bogging the game down. While I clearly demonstrated my preference in the title, I should note up front that MLB umpires have been getting much better in recent years. Fangraphs wrote at the start of last year that MLB umps’ overall accuracy has risen from 84 percent in 2008 to 92.45 percent in 2022. Those of us raised on the legend of Angel Hernandez are doing something of an old man yells at cloud routine when we complain about hilariously inept umpiring. It’s a lot better now than it was when we were kids.

The problem is that the human eye and brain are not better at identifying whether a slider caught a centimeter of the black than Hawk-Eye cameras are. “At the beginning of the pitch tracking era, there was a lot more room for improvement on pitches in the strike zone, and progress there came more rapidly. That is no longer the case,” wrote Fangraphs. “Umpires are still improving at roughly the same slow, steady pace on pitches outside the zone. However, inside the zone, their accuracy has actually declined by a hair over the past two years. In other words, it looks like we’re finally learning the limits of umpire accuracy, at least on pitches inside the zone.”

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Fangraphs notes that between the chase, waste and heart zones, umpires missed about 1.87 calls per game in 2023, and I agree with Davy Andrews’ sentiment that “I can’t really imagine asking umpires to improve much more than that.” They’ve done a great job getting pretty decent at an insane job not made for humans. They also fundamentally altered the game this year through their new labor agreement with MLB. Whoopsies! “Everybody’s zone has shrunk,” Angels catcher Travis d’Arnaud told The Athletic back in May. “Every (umpire) across the league.” The Athletic reported that MLB “negotiated a seemingly simple change in how home-plate umpires are graded and evaluated” which “caught [MLB players] by surprise” in how it led to umpires universally shrinking the strike zone they were used to.

While the total number of pitches affected is small, pitchers and catchers do not see it that way, because this shrunken zone that more closely adheres to the rulebook has dramatically affected how they gameplan. Like it or not, banking on umpires missing some pitches is a fundamental part of how pitchers have strategized for over a century, and I teach this to our little leaguers with my other coaches every year. The buffer zone on each side of the plate that MLB umps used to be evaluated in has shrunk from 2 inches to 3/4 of an inch, a total reduction in the buffer zone of 1.5 inches, which has boosted their accuracy statistics. That may not sound like a lot, but in a game where the strike zone is 17 inches wide and the margin for error gets smaller every year, it’s a lot.

That said, the crime here is not MLB umpires negotiating this change into their contracts, but that The Athletic polled 15 MLB players and found that “No players interviewed could recall being informed before the season that this was coming — by their teams, the MLB Players Association or the league.” A lot of MLB’s problems aren’t all that complex and stem from the fact that it’s run by a complete doofus commissioner representing some of the cheapest, greediest and most incompetent sports team owners that mankind has ever seen.

But as a proud hater and someone who endured 14 years of much more than 1.87 missed calls per game that robbed me of precious at bats and outs on the mound, my vengeful baseball brain has disqualified all of humanity from being a baseball umpire. I don’t care that the correct percentage of overall called balls and strikes rose to a high of 88.2 percent in March and April of this year, that’s still far too many misses for what is supposed to be a person having a neutral impact on the game. If you created this preposterous job today, you’d get laughed out of the room. You have to eyeball something moving at 90-plus miles per hour from a little over 60 feet away and judge whether it’s a centimeter on or off the plate? Get the hell out of here man.

MLB umpires got 99.26 percent of calls right down the heart of the plate in 2023, which is an unacceptable level of failure that no robot would match. I know some may look at that as a large number, but MLB umpires missing a shocking 0.74 percent of strikes in the happy zone takes me back to many rage-filled moments on the mound where I threw a clear strike that was called a ball and the next pitch got hit hard over my head and it wasn’t my fault damnit. Fuck these umpires, is something I have said too many times to count across a lifetime of coaching and playing–and even umpiring a little myself and learning that I was not up to it. Fuck me too, I suck at this impossible job.

Baseball umpiring is an endeavor rooted in man’s hubris that has no business existing in 2025. Bring us the robots! Stop this half-measure with challenges wasting our precious time, just end the madness and outsource the whole gig to the machine built to do it that grades people on how much worse they are at this than it is.

I know this is an anti-labor take that docks my socialist credentials, but this is what decades of baseball madness does to a man’s brain. This is a game centered around perpetual failure, or the catastrophic realization as a pitcher that you cannot force hitters to meet that very low bar, and it’s hard enough to play this evil sport without knowing that the schmuck catcher on the other team great at framing pitches is going to steal a lot of strikes tonight because the human eye is a flawed tool.

Pitchers are throwing harder than ever with more movement than ever (and getting hurt at higher rates than ever), and any world where hitting is becoming “nearly impossible” means that umpiring is too, because they both must track this shifting lightning bolt headed their way. Challenges are long overdue, and we really missed out on some all-time hilarious ump shows not instituting this system while we still had Angel Hernandez to kick around and overturn entire games worth of missed calls, but this move doesn’t go far enough. There is good evidence that the improvement of MLB umpires is plateauing, revealing a ceiling for mortals I think any reasonable person can accept exists in this ridiculous job unfit for a human. This is the first step towards the inevitable implementation of full-blown robot umpire rule, and we should just rip the band-aid off and do what we’re eventually going to do right now, because it’s better for the game. Angel Hernandez made baseball worse every time he stepped behind home plate, and while there are far less Angel Hernandez’s today, MLB has not completely rid itself of these types.

Officiating errors are a fact of life in more judgement-based games like a foul in basketball or whatever the hell a catch is in football, but baseball is literally black and white. The pitch went over the plate, black included, or it didn’t. It caught the top of the zone, or it didn’t. The runner reached the base before the ball hit the fielder’s glove, or they didn’t. We know umpires miss a certain percentage of pitches because we have technology that’s better than them at this that is evaluating them. Just give the robots the job already, and spare future generations from the madness of this impossible endeavor for humans no serious person would invent today.