Way to go, Upper Valley. You took a tough winter’s best shot, and you’re still standing as spring tentatively arrives. Yes, we all know that mud season is on the horizon, but our thoughts are turning to sun-drenched baseball diamonds and “take me out to the ballgame.” Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season is less than a week away, and it cannot come a moment too soon for fans slowly emerging from baseball hibernation.
The recently concluded World Baseball Classic provided a delicious foretaste of the coming season. Held every three or four years, the pre-season tournament reliably demonstrates that while baseball may be America’s national pastime, in many places around the world such as Japan and Latin America, it is nothing short of a national passion. Watching the Venezuelan team celebrate its thrilling 3-2 championship game win over the United States Tuesday night was moving for the pure intensity of emotion displayed. One could hardly help but feel that a certain amount of heartache was being washed away amid the tears of joy.
An added bonus for Red Sox fans was seeing several of the team’s players perform superlatively for their respective national heritage teams — the USA, of course; but also Japan, Italy, Mexico, Great Britain, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela. Their performances impart promise to the team’s 2026 campaign, and after all, what’s spring without a healthy dose of optimism?
Of course, no baseball season dawns without the shadow of a few dark clouds. One is the sport’s continued addiction to revenue partnerships with legalized online gambling companies, a weakness it shares with other major sports leagues and that is manifested in incessant television advertising promoting betting.
Two Cleveland Guardians pitchers, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, are currently under federal indictment for an alleged pitch-fixing conspiracy to which they have pleaded not guilty. This scheme is alleged to have netted gamblers at least $450,000 on so-called prop bets, which involve predictive wagers on outcomes of particular pitches or at-bats etc. This is pernicious and can’t help but cast doubt on the integrity of the game.
And with ticket and concession prices being what they are now, an actual trip to the ballpark is becoming beyond the reach of the ordinary fan. Television options for baseball viewing are increasingly muddled with the fragmentation of television markets into multiple streaming services and viewing platforms which cannot be told apart without an expensive scorecard.
But we have buried the lead, as used to be said in the newspaper business. The most significant development of the upcoming baseball season is the advent of the robotic umpire, also known as the Automated Ball-Strike challenge system. Depending on something called Hawk-Eye tracking technology, it stands to change the game profoundly, although unpredictably.
This is not to say that technology is replacing human umpires entirely or even most of the time, but rather providing aggrieved players with recourse when they think the human arbiter has erred in calling a strike a ball, or vice versa. Here’s how it works: Each team gets two challenges per game. If the challenge is successful, the team retains that challenge. If the challenge fails, the team loses a challenge.
Only batters, pitchers and catchers can challenge, and they have to do so within two seconds of the umpire’s call, by tapping their head and verbally issuing a challenge. As a practical matter, most experts predict that catchers will issue the bulk of the challenges, being in better position than either pitchers or batters to see where a pitch crosses or doesn’t cross the plate. Also because they are deemed to be more objective observers, having less invested in a particular pitch than their pitcher or the batter.
MLB says that based on experience in the minor leagues, the challenge system will be used sparingly and will not add materially to the length of games. What it might do, according to experts, is alter how the strike zone has traditionally been interpreted by human umpires as they try to conform with the rigidities of the strictly rectangular, by-the-rule-book, Hawk-Eye version. Welcome to the exacting brave new world of baseball.
Several years ago, we looked with abhorrence on the prospect of robotic umpires. Umpires are fallible human beings, and to err is human, after all. The fact is that they get calls right an astonishing percentage of the time, as the existing replay system for out and safe calls on the bases has demonstrated. But we have come to think that if a mistaken ball/strike call at a key moment of a game can be erased by technological magic, why not? Let’s get it right.
Still if the irrefutable ball-strike calls produced by technology spell the end of the profanity-laced, chest-thumping, base-tossing, dirt-kicking managerial tirades that precede ejections from the game by human umpires, then a little more color will have been drained from life.