Minor League Baseball is Now Using AI Umpires to Call Strikes
"There's no guarantee that robot umpires will make their way to the majors," writes the San Francisco Chronicle. "But the system is as close as it has been now, one level below." Here's how it looks for a minor league/Triple-A team, the Albuquerque Isotopes: Using the same computerized optical tracking technology known as Hawk-Eye that has been used for several years now in pro tennis and some other sports, MLB's new Automated ball-strike system is a rather in-depth setup. In early April, MLB set up eight high-speed cameras and hundreds of receivers around Isotopes Park that, along with the video from the cameras, add to a triangulation process that can help determine exactly where the ball crosses the strike zone — despite there being no camera directly over or behind the plate. The MLB says it is confident a foul ball hitting one camera or a light drizzle of rain during a game won't affect the data accuracy. "It's here," said Albuquerque Isotopes manager Warren Schaeffer. "We'll all get used to it. As long as we don't see it really messing things up, we'll adjust." The manager also added, "I don't know what human umpires miss in a game — maybe three or four calls a game? And this system seems like it's missing three or four a game, I guess. I'm sure that they can improve it and it's always going to keep improving I guess." "The technology is there," said an MLB official who spoke to the Journal about the implementation of the automated ball-strike system... At this point, MLB is trying to get enough of a sample size to see how the game is affected and troubleshoot any unforeseen issues. There's still an umpire behind the plate making the punching gesture for a strike — but he's just repeating whatever call the system has beamed into his ear. The paper shares this story from a relief pitcher watching another pitcher disagree with a "called ball" early in the game, and asking the umpire whether it was in the strike zone and why it wasn't called a strike. "And the umpire just shrugged and said, 'I don't know.'"
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