Buster Olney wonders how a robot umpire would call balls and strikes:
On Sunday Night Baseball, the K Zone identifies the pitch as a ball or strike immediately, the instant that it passes through or outside the strike zone, so the process should be seamless. Last weekend, ESPN’s Will Dorney — in St. Louis to do graphics for Sunday Night Baseball — mentioned an idea that you could envision the moment he said it out loud: Strike and strikeout music for the home pitchers, activated automatically by the strike zone electronics.
In other words: walk-off music for pitchers.
Meh. You still need an umpire behind the plate to call foul tips and plays at the plate, and for moments when the electronics fail. I also do not advocate a complete robot strike caller. The is an objective dimension to strike calling, and a subjective dimension. The robot should be concerned with the objective dimension, did the ball cross the plate. The human umpire should be concerned with the subjective dimension, did the ball cross the plate at the right height. Most of the ball ball/strike calls we see are in the horizontal dimension, not the vertical dimension, because the vertical dimension is ambiguous among batters. Let the ump decide on up and down, and a light comes on in his mask to indicate if the ball was over the plate.
On another subject, Olney also has this whopper in his column:
Gary Sanchez was promoted to the big leagues last Aug. 3, and since then, he has hit 34 homers in 113 games, including a booming shot off Drew Pomeranz on Friday night. But rival evaluators have seen a major regression in his defense this year, particularly in how he moves behind the plate. One of the theories guiding the Yankees’ handling of Sanchez now is that he got somewhat muscle-bound during the last offseason, gaining 12 pounds through weight training. Sanchez has been in the process of trying to lose that extra weight during the season, to improve his flexibility and his catching.
Muscle bound is a myth. The stronger the better. Ballplayers used to go for wiry strength because they thought that being muscle bound would hurt their swings for the reasons Olney sites above. Players started lifting seriously in the 1980s, and the players with bigger muscles started to hit more home runs. Yet the myth persists.
‘The stronger the better’ is also a myth. Baseball players need a combination of muscular power and muscular endurance, specific to muscle groups that are relevant to their position. ‘Strength’ at a muscular level is by definition the ability to move the most mass you can one time. What you really want is ‘the more powerful the better’.
There is also a proven link between increased muscle mass and loss of flexibility, most obviously proved in athletes who spend a lot of time bench pressing – generally their pectoral/shoulder flexibility goes in the toilet, UNLESS of course they are following a complimentary flexibility programme. You would think that professional sporting organisations would have people running exactly that.