In addition to letting players steal first base, the Atlantic League — which serves as a testing ground for Major League Baseball — has employed a number of different changes this season which could eventually be adopted by MLB.
One of them? Robotic umpires calling balls and strikes.
In every stadium of the eight-team Atlantic League, there is now a TrackMan device above home plate which uses 3-D Doppler radar to register balls and strikes. Once the radar decides whether a pitch is in or out of the strike zone, the device relays its decision via wifi to an iPhone that’s connected to a wired earbud in the umpire’s ear. As of now at least, a human is still the one signaling “ball” or “strike.”
After working the plate during a recent game between the Long Island Ducks and Somerset Patriots, umpire J.B. Torres said he agreed with all but six of the calls which were made on the 259 pitches that were thrown.
Following the game, Ducks manager Wally Backman predicted that MLB will adopt the system within five years, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“It’s going to happen,” he said. “There have been a few pitches that are questionable, but not as many as if it was a human. The machine is definitely going to be more right than they are.”
If MLB is happy with how the experiment with the automated strike zone works out, the robo umpires will almost certainly be tested out in the minors before going to the big leagues.
“We feel it’s incumbent on us to figure out whether we could make it work,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told the WSJ. “That’s what we are doing.”
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