Atlanta Braves should be pushing the electronic strike zone

There’s been some discussions around baseball this week about the advent of an electronic strike zone.  Peering into the future, the Braves might want to get on board this train early.

Before I get to the Atlanta Braves angle in all of this, let’s do a quick run-through of the reason why the topic has come up.

There were two high-profile incidents within the past few days that has made the ‘Electronic Strike Zone’ a hot subject for blogs, radio, and other media:

• The Cubs’ Ben Zobrist was complaining about a game-ending strike call (turns out he was wrong).  But he wants an electronic strike zone.
• Tigers infielder Ian Kinsler excoriated Angel Hernandez – of course – for his calls on Monday.  Kinsler actually getting thrown out of the game after a ball was called.

The complaint from MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred is that the technology isn’t ready for prime time yet.  That’s actually a curious statement given that the hard part seems to already have been solved … and not recently.

But he also is concerned about removing the human element from the game, saying:

"“And there is a human aspect to that, a work aspect to it that’s always been an important part of our game. I don’t think you can just jump to the conclusion that if you have (the) technology to do it that’s the right thing for your product.”"

More on that in a bit.

About the Technology

The Questec system has been around to help evaluate the performance of umpires since the year Ozzie Albies was born – 1997.  It wasn’t a real-time system, per se, but every pitch is indeed tracked in real time and the system is accurate to a half inch.  Since then, things have evolved significantly.

We’ve already had the first baseball game called by electronic means.  That happened 2 full years ago.  And we’re all used to seeing FOX’s strike zone boxes, GameDay’s live animations, and other resources derived from existing technology… with real-time delivery of the data.

We have measurements of the spin rates of pitches.  We have had studies done on why that matters.  We know everything there is to know about pitch movement.

Heck, we can even gripe about umpire decisions via twitter:

So the notion that the technology isn’t ready to use is almost bizarre, but there is one aspect of such a system that would need to be ‘customized’.  Let’s face it:  Aaron Judge‘s strike zone is going to be different from that of Ozzie Albies.

But if that’s the extent of the concern, then you would think it would be an issue that could be ‘dialed in’ over the course of even just a few AB’s from each player.  But that’s my engineering/software background speaking.

That Human Element

In practical terms, the finding of “ball” or “strike” would be easily communicated to scoreboards, media, and umpires.  Want a human to make the same hand gestures and STEEEEE-RIKE calls?  Sure – do it.  Whatever.  I don’t care how you do it… but baseball needs to do this.

Human umpires still need to be behind the plate regardless.  They need to be watching for check swings, listening for foul tips, catcher’s interference, hit batters, and whether a third strike was caught cleanly by a catcher.

They also need to be present for safe/out calls at home, boundary calls, fair/foul calls, base path issues, and more.  Heck, even Angel Hernandez might even improve if he didn’t have to worry about flipping his coin 250+ times per game to determine balls and strikes.

So Commissioner?  Yes – your human element will still be present.  Don’t be concerned about that.

But the Commish has had another concern that he’s been working on:  the pace of play.

Turns out this could help in a big way.