Las Vegas Ballpark, Summerlin, Nevada (AAA #9 - Time for a computerized strike zone, even if Ángel Hernández did retire)

 

 

A computerized strike zone?

Please. The sooner, the better.

That topic is particularly appropriate today because one of the people mentioned most often in discussions of the idea, Major League umpire Ángel Hernández, retired last night. Hernández probably had the worst reputations among all the MLB umpires for missing calls, although every umpire misses some calls, and some umpires may miss more than Hernández did. But Mike Vaccaro of the New York Post points out that Hernandez had “the great misfortune of being bad at his job at a moment in time when everyone could see just how bad he was.”

Umpiring is a tough job. When Kerry did the non-sports medicine for the Colorado Rockies during Spring Trainings in the late 2000s, she would also see umpires who came to town and had a sinus infection or anything like that. She got along with them great, although to a man they thought she was crazy when she said she would have enjoyed being an umpire. Many were nice people, some weren’t. All were pretty job at their job, some were excellent.

It's the ones who are not so good at their jobs, and don’t have great personalities, who give umpires a bad name. As Vaccaro points out, the job has gotten tougher with instant replay, particularly with the automated ball-strike systems.

The technology is now there, it is good (incidentally, the picture includes some of the cameras used for the pitch system at tonight's game). Fans can see the results almost immediately, even if the players and umpires can’t. The MLB App shows the location of every pitch of every game within seconds. I’m sure I’m not the only fan who has the App on, and looks at it after every call where either the batter or the pitcher glares at the umpire. Most calls are right, but several per game are not.

You can now find compilations on the web of bad calls. One of my favorites about Hernández is here, although many of the videos are from before the time when it was customary to have a box drawn around the strike zone on the screen.

With the instant replay challenge system now in effect, we can see how good MLB umpires really are on the calls on the bases, and frankly, they’re very, very good. Kerry and I have been to 14 MLB games this season, and have seen four calls overturned. On the other hand, calling balls and strikes is apparently far harder – I heard someone in MLB proudly say a few years ago that umpires got 95% of the calls right. As a test of human performance, that sounds pretty good, but when there are typically 200-250 pitches in a game, and the hitters swing at something like half, that means the umpire is calling over 100 pitches per game, and making, on average, five mistakes per game, or roughly one every two innings. That’s quite a few, particularly when you realize that it means there is, on average, one blown call in the eighth or ninth inning every game. Humans aren’t perfect, but I’d rather that the human element be the players’ performances, not the umpires’.

Mine is not a unanimous opinion, by any means. Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred has said that some version is likely to come into the game, but probably not by next year. He talks about technical challenges, like deciding what the top and bottom of the strike zone is for each individual player, and about concern about losing the importance of a catcher’s ability to “frame” a pitch (convince the umpire that a pitch that’s not quite a strike really is in the strike zone). I’m sympathetic to the first, but think it’s not too hard to work out – establish it at the start of the season for each hitter, and the batter will learn what’s going to be called a strike or ball, and the scouting reports can tell the pitchers if it’s different than what it might look like based on the player’s batting stance. As far as the value of catcher being able to deceive umpires, I understand why it’s a part of the game now, but not why you’d want it to be.

Baseball has adopted a version of instant replay on many calls, but ball and strike calls can not be appealed, so the strike zone is whatever the home plate umpire says it is, on any given pitch. Arguments between the manager and the umpire are a sometimes entertaining part of the game, but frankly, I prefer to see fewer arguments and more time spent playing. I also want to see games decided by what the players do, not by a mistake by an umpire.

They’ve been experimenting with a computerized strike zone in the minor leagues, so we’ve seen it in action. Actually, they’ve been experimenting with two versions.

In one, the call is made by the computer, which tells the home plate umpire instantly, who announces the call, and then it's displayed on the scoreboard. In those games (tonight’s was one of those), it’s so seamless that you can’t tell that there’s a computer involved, except for the fact that no one so much as glares at the umpire on a close call. Instead, batters who are called out on strikes glare at the display on the scoreboard.

In the other, the umpire makes the call, but the batter and the catcher (and no one else, including the pitcher or manager) has the right to appeal the call, and then an umpire checks what the computer says. If your team makes more than a certain number (two?) of unsuccessful challenges, you lose the ability to challenge. So there aren’t many challenges, and they only take a few seconds.

The challenge system is the version that Manfred says is likely to be instituted. Personally, I like the fully automated version better, but the challenge system is far better, and fairer, than the current system.

The venue:

One of the pleasures of this quest has been the people we’ve connected with at games, old friends from as far back as high school. Tonight it was John Garner, whom I played basketball with 50+ years ago. He was a lot better than I was, so he was playing on the high school varsity with me when I was a senior and he was a sophomore (and he ended up playing Division I basketball). But that also meant that he was in Kerry's class, so Kerry and I had different people in common. He’s now a financial advisor in Las Vegas. It’s always fascinating to catch up with people that you saw every day for a stretch of time, but then basically hadn’t seen (other than Facebook books) since. He was a wonderful host - if everyone is apologizing for talking too much at the end of the evening, you've probably had a good conversation.

One of the disappointments has been that a lot of the minor league stadiums look alike. They're beautiful (to our eyes, at least), but they seem much more homogeneous than the major league parks. Part of that is that the stadiums we've seen (until tonight) have all been built between 1992 and 2014. Nothing from the early 1900s, like Fenway or Wrigley, or from the mid-1900s, like Dodger Stadium. But Las Vegas Ballpark, which is only five years old, does look different, and in a good way. For one thing, it has a swimming pool, something I'm partial to (our home field, Chase Field in Phoenix, is the only MLB park with a pool). And while there's the obligatory patch of grass in the outfield for kids to play on, it doesn't dominate the view from behind home plate the way it does in many stadiums. Las Vegas is building a new stadium for the A's, and the designs are spectacular, but it's too bad that this stadium will no longer be the premier baseball stadium in town, because it's a good one.  

The game:

The game was actually a rematch of a game we saw in Sugarland, Texas, a few weeks ago. Each time, the home team won. This time, the Aviators won 9-5. A five-run fourth inning basically put it out of reach. The game had 19 hits, 13 walks, four players hit by pitches, three players caught stealing, and two balks, so it was a wild one. 

The best individual performance was probably by Cooper Hummel, of the losing Space Cowboys. He hit a home run and a double, and the only time Las Vegas got him out was when their second baseman made a diving catch of a line drive. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Hummel. He played for the Diamondbacks a couple of years ago, as the backup catcher on a very bad team. One of the things that would occasionally show up on the scoreboard when he batted was the human interest note that he said that his father told him that the second most important thing to learn if he wanted to be a major leaguer was how to switch hit (he does). Before a game one day, he was signing autographs along the left field wall, near our seats, and I couldn't resist. I didn't ask for an autograph, but I asked what he father had told him was the first most important thing to learn if he wanted to be a major leaguer. 

"Love the game."

I think he does, and so do I.