Wow! What a wonderfully entertaining, if ultimately disappointing, World Series. Congratulations to the Blue Jays. Congratulations to the Dodgers. No congratulations, however, to Major League Baseball which needs to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21^st century.

I want you to cast your memory back to game 3, the 18-inning marathon. Remember the play where Bo Bichette was on first and Daulton Varsho started walking towards first because he thought ball four had been called? Bichette responded by walking towards second and was tagged out when the umpire, Mark Wegner, called the pitch a strike. Replays of that pitch showed it was a ball, by a large margin. It wasn’t close. It was clearly a ball. 

What was the impact of that call? Varsho ultimately did draw a walk, which would have placed Bichette on second base. Then Alejandro Kirk singled, which would likely have driven Bichette in (admittedly not for certain, because Bichette’s speed was limited by his knee injury). The inning ended with runners on first and third, with the possibility of more runs being scored if there were only two out. Had the Blue Jays scored in that inning, the game would not have gone to extra innings and the Jays would have won it. Did that play cost the Jays a World Series Championship? Arguably yes, it might have. You can’t say that for certain, because we don’t have an alternate universe in which we could watch that inning play out,  but that was a big and important call.

I’m not interested in making excuses for the Jays. They played a terrific Series and they don’t need to make excuses for their work. I don’t want to blame Bo Bichette, who should have been a little more alert and cautious. I don’t even particularly want to blame the umpire, Mark Wegner. In that game, 609 pitches were thrown. According to umpscorecards.com, one of several sites that use computer analysis to grade umpire performance, the ump made the call on 291 of them, and got 279 of those calls right. (I think I saw another summary which suggested 277 correct – it depends on how the algorithm is done). Either way, he got better than 95% of calls right and that’s (just slightly) better than average umpire performance. No, the blame goes to Major League Baseball (MLB) for relying on human analysis when the technology exists to get that call right.

According to Umpirescorecards.com, umpires missed a grand total of 61 calls in seven games or just about one every inning. That failure rate computes to exactly 5%, by the way, which is about what the failure rate is during the regular season. One might have expected a slightly better performance from the cream of the crop of umpires assigned to the World Series, wouldn’t you think? Think again. The World Series umps weren’t necessarily the cream of the crop. MLB doesn’t publish an official umpire ranking list but unofficial rankings are available. According to their evaluations, the World Series umps averaged only 36^th out of 92 umpires ranked. Interestingly, the umpire with the best ranking, Alan Porter who is judged to be the 3^rd best umpire in baseball, had far and away the most accurate ball/strike call record in the series, with 155 out of 159 calls correct.

But I digress – let’s get back to 61 failed calls. Some of those misses are more important than others. Sometimes a victimized batter gets on base anyway. Sometimes a pitcher robbed of a strike battles back and gets an out anyway. But on average, once every inning there is a call missed that has the potential to affect the game’s outcome significantly. Why does MLB put up with that?

The ABS (Automated Ball & Strike) system has been in use in the minor leagues since 2019. It started in an independent minor league and was adopted in the broader minor league system in 2021. By 2023, every Triple A ballpark had the ABS capability installed.

We saw ABS earlier this year, when MLB instituted a challenge system as a trial run for spring training games. For those not familiar with the challenge system, a called pitch could be challenged immediately by the batter, the pitcher, or the catcher. Nobody else, and not after a 15 second decision period for a quick video review. Interestingly for the Blue Jays, Alejandro Kirk was reportedly very, very good at the challenge game.

In late September, MLB announced that they would be implementing the ABS challenge system for the 2026 season. Why, you may ask, didn’t they go whole hog and put in place a full-time robot umpiring system? According to my little AI-assisted search results, MLB cited certain factors. One was survey feedback from players, fans and coaches. Surprising to me was the notion that players preferred the challenge system. It seems to me that they ought to prefer to get it right every time.

A second piece of rationale was that in the minor leagues, ABS umpiring resulted in more walks and slower pace of games, which was a concern. Reducing game time has been a major concern for MLB for several years, and so this is a valid concern, but I would dismiss it for several reasons. First, major league pitchers have better control than minor leaguers do. That’s why they’re in the majors. So, they are less likely to throw significantly more walks than those guys in the minors. Second, pitchers at all levels would learn that they need to throw more strikes, and batters would then learn that they need to swing more. The result of those two trends would be more balls in play, and let’s face it, balls in play are where baseball gets its excitement. So, I don’t see full time ABS as a detriment.

The third piece of logic offered by MLB was that they wanted to “retain the human element of the game.” In other words, let’s go ahead and continue to get it wrong. Part of that human element was to celebrate the art of “pitch framing” by good catchers. Once again, Kirk is a master of this and you might think I’d be happy to have his artistry continue. But, you’d be wrong about that, for two reasons.

The first is a bit of a philosophical objection. To coach kids at an early age that part of their job is to try to deceive the umpire and gain an advantage that your pitcher didn’t really earn simply goes against the grain with me. 

I know. I’ve heard that “if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying” mantra before. My problem is that I’ve never liked that view. I recently watched a video of American Jack Sock during a game telling his opponent Lleyton Hewitt that a ball that had been called out was really in and that he should challenge it. Hewitt did, and the challenge was successful and Sock lost that point. I loved that sportsmanship. 

The second objection is a bit more technical. Buck Martinez, (with whom I don’t always agree, by the way) has repeatedly opined that the focus on ball framing technique is spoiling the defensive game of catchers. I think he’s right. Catchers are going down to one knee instead of remaining in the traditional squat position with two consequent losses in defense. One, they are less able to pop up and throw to second if a runner attempts to steal. Second, they are much less able to move laterally and block wild pitches in the dirt, resulting in more base runner advances on wild pitches and passed balls. If we did away with the notion that the catcher’s main job is to deceive the umpire as often as possible, they could just go back to catching and throwing the damn ball. 

Using full-time robot umps would:

• Make pitchers focus on throwing strikes
• Make batters focus on hitting pitches that are in the strike zone because they don’t have to swing at pitches that are “too close to take.”
• Allow catchers to focus on catching the ball, throwing the ball, and calling a good game for the pitcher.
• Eliminate stupid arguments between managers and umpires.

You’d still need a home plate umpire to make fair/foul ball calls, to detect catcher’s or batter’s interference, to make the calls on plays at the plate etc. When minor league games tried full-time ABS, the computer gave the umpire the call and he signalled it on the field. I’m not sure why you’d need that subtlety. You could use red/green lights, perhaps with an audible signal for baserunners to know quickly what the call was.

Tennis began implementing hawk-eye technology in 2006. Like baseball, it began as a challenge system. Propelled a bit by Covid pandemic restrictions, the Australian Open became the first grand slam tournament to fully implement automated line calls in 2021. The transition is nearly complete across the major tennis venues now, and one gets the impression that the only  thing holding it back is the acquisition and implementation of the technology. I don’t hear anyone complaining about the lack of human element in tennis, and it’s nice to see a tournament without a bunch of stupid histrionics from players upset by a bad call. 

I noticed that in tennis, some tournaments are also using technology for calling foot faults, which leads me to speculate that foul/fair calls in baseball could also benefit from the use of cameras and computers. Replays will show fairly reliably whether a fly ball lands inside or outside the chalk line, but it’s hard to tell sometimes whether a ground ball was fair or foul when it passes over the bag. Robots could help.

Maybe we could use cameras to make offside calls in hockey. We’d need some way to clearly distinguish home and away skates, but wouldn’t it be smart to blow the whistle when a computer detected an offside rather than playing on for 45 seconds and then sitting through two or three minutes of review when a goal is challenged? I wonder if the technology could accurately determine whether a stick contacted the puck above the crossbar? Maybe we could even use hawk-eye to tell us whether the soccer player writhing on the turf was actually ever touched.

I understand that baseball is a game rich in tradition. But there’s no reason to hang onto a five percent failure rate simply because that’s how it has always been done. Bring on robot umpires ASAP!