Friday, September 11, 2009

calling balls and strikes

When watching baseball on television, I've occasionally seen a graphic that shows where a particular pitch has crossed the front of home plate. It is a rectangle shown near the batter and above the plate to help the viewer see where the pitch was and how accurate the umpire's call was.

With such technology available, why not use it in actual games to call balls and strikes? Something similar is used to make line calls in tennis tournaments, whether it is an automatic 'beep' sound on serves, or a close-up on other line calls that can be utilized when asked for by a player. I know, I know, there are traditionalists in baseball that are going to say that baseball is about personality as much as anything else, and how a particular umpire calls pitches is part of the game. But I'd rather have consistency and accuracy.

This would mean objectively calling pitches a ball and or a strike regardless of whether or not it hits the catcher's glove 'just right.' It would mean no more 'outside strikes' which I think ruined the game for years (the catcher would set a target outside the strike zone, the pitcher would hit the target perfectly, and would get the 'strike' call - even though the pitch was outside!). Batters had to protect against such pitches, which had an effect on inside pitches that were close to the batter. Or if a pitch were to cross the strike zone, but miss the target set by the catcher, it wouldn't be called a strike. Some umpires have a low strike zone, others have a high strike zone... there are lots of idiosyncrasies. It'd be nice to have one strike zone for a change.

I imagine that there must be a way to send the information that is made for television
immediately to the masks of umpires so that they would be able to make calls as fast as they would otherwise. And given that they are only shown a rectangle and a 'dot,' they can still exercise some subjectivity, such as pitches that cross one of the zone lines.

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