Photo: Richard Meek/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images
The one constant through the years, James Earl Jones famously said as he stood in the middle of a cornfield, has been baseball. And as long as baseball has been a constant, so too has the umpire. The looming figure in blue with a booming voice and the personality of a junkyard dog has always been a unique character in the timeless nine-inning drama that is — or at least was — America’s pastime. But the 2025 baseball season, which gets underway in earnest on Thursday, could serve as a curtain call for those all-too-fallible arbiters of the game.
Baseball has been undergoing some pretty dramatic changes. The sport may still be timeless in a sense, but it is now timed. Spring training this year has featured another seismic twist: the chance for the pitcher, catcher, or batter to overturn the umpire’s ball or strike call with a camera array called the Automatic Ball-Strike system, or ABS.
Since 2008, instant replay has assisted umpires in ruling on home runs and other key plays. And since 2014, teams have been allotted two replay challenges for calls they don’t like. But in any other era, the very idea of reversing an umpire’s pitch call would be unthinkable. No longer. Witness Jazz Chisholm’s challenge of a punch-out and his insouciant jog to first base last week before the call was officially overturned:
Jazz didn’t even wait to see if he was correct 💀 pic.twitter.com/rF2aTizST1
— Talkin’ Yanks (@TalkinYanks) March 18, 2025
For now, robo-umps are in the trial phase; ABS won’t debut in the regular season until 2026 at the earliest. But if this really will be the final season umpires do their primary job unassisted, what do we stand to lose as we replace one more facet of humanity? Or put another way: If players, managers, and the crowd have nothing to yell at the umpire or no reason to boo them any longer, is it still really baseball?
Umpires have often relished their near-dictatorial authority and the built-in antagonism they provoke from players and coaches. There’s an old quote from Bill “Catfish” Klem, one of the most famous umpires of all time, who said a pitch “ain’t nothing until I call it.” He might have been arrogant, but he was also correct: According to the rules, a pitch is only a strike when the umpire says it is. Yes, there are strike-zone parameters in the official rules (from “the hollow beneath the kneecaps” to “the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants,” as if that clears things up), but umpires have never really followed them. The zone has always been fluid and at the umpire’s capricious discretion; every baseball autobiography and retired player’s podcast is full of stories of umpires, after getting into it with a certain player, retaliating with an awful call. Klem, by the way, had a habit of ejecting players just for calling him “Catfish,” a nickname he hated.
Retired umpire Doug Harvey reveals in his wild autobiography (modestly titled They Called Me God: The Best Umpire Who Ever Lived) the often-suspected assertion that umpires — not him, though — will unfairly speed up a meaningless game so they can go home. Later in the book, Harvey describes one of the most important lessons he learned from another legendary (and hotheaded) umpire, Al Barlick: “If you make a call, hang with it.” This ethos has guided umpire comportment for generations, cemented the ump’s role as a lightning rod for players and fans, and enabled another cherished spectacle of baseball: the managerial ejection, from Bobby Cox’s and Lou Piniella’s clockworklike temper tantrums to the GOAT of baseball dismissals, courtesy of Phillip Wellman.
While arguing and booing them is cathartic (listen to the crowd roar as Steve McMichael threatened notoriously inaccurate umpire Ángel Hernández), it’s ultimately at least partly a charade. The ump’s “Okay, you got everything out” quip at the end says it all in this famous donnybrook:
Technology has complicated this delicate balance. In the aughts, baseball installed QuesTec pitch-tracking technology in every ballpark, and ESPN’s K-Zone and Fox’s FoxTrax (now called PitchCast) superimposed approximated strike zones onto viewers’ televisions. QuesTec allowed teams and umpires to analyze every pitch, while the televised strike zone led to a Rashomon effect in which fans saw one thing and umpires another, creating (further) distrust in their work.
This explosion of data revealed to ball clubs the strike-zone biases of each umpire. Thus in the 2010s, it became standard for catchers to “frame” their pitches with sleight of hand that tests the limits of human perception.
Analytics determined a good framer is worth two to three wins a season. Accordingly, teams have staffed their front offices with experts like Josh Ruffin, of the Minnesota Twins, a former military data analyst with national-security clearance. The recently retired umpire Jim Reynolds, now MLB’s umpire supervisor, tells a story that illustrates what a hall of mirrors ball-and-strike calling has become: “I had one conversation with a Dodgers catcher — I’d ball a pitch and he’d be mad because their own statistics said that I should have called that a strike.”
Umpires had a trove of new data at their disposal too, and their accuracy improved. Since 2008, called strikes outside the zone have decreased 5.5 percent, and called balls in the zone have dropped 14.3 percent. Yet robot umpiring has seemed inevitable to many in the baseball world. The development of ABS wasn’t due to one single event, according to Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice-president of baseball operations. It came more from a desire to fix important missed calls, combined with the opportunity to try out various systems in Triple-A when MLB took over operations of the minor leagues in 2021. They tested two approaches — full ABS, in which the umpire is a passive observer and listens for a beep in his ear when a strike has been thrown, and a challenge system — and surveyed fans about it all.
“I’m oversimplifying a bit, but there are two camps of fans,” Sword explained. “Those that believe that the camera technology exists and that we should use it to get every call exactly right. Then there’s a camp that feels that baseball is a human game and part of what you’re coming to see when you buy a ticket is the drama that unfolds with human officials and that baseball would be losing something if you took the home-plate-umpire judgment out.”
The challenge system is a compromise, Sword said. The human element is retained for the vast majority of the game (in which each team throws 150 pitches on average), but teams can invoke the technology to intervene at important moments. Each team gets two chances a game, and if a challenge is successful, they get to keep it.
Triple-A managers, who have spent two seasons working with both approaches, speak highly of the one MLB settled on.
“One of the things I like about the system is that if you give the umpire immediate feedback, they can calibrate almost immediately,” said Morgan Ensberg, manager of the Durham Bulls, a Tampa Bay Rays affiliate.
“It doesn’t put everything into the umpire’s hands,” said Shelley Duncan, manager of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, a Yankees affiliate. “Now, it really becomes about the players, and it’s almost peaceful. As a manager, I don’t have to worry about getting angry at the umpires nonstop. I mean, we’ve all been to a game where somebody in the stands yells at the umpire, ‘It’s not about you. You’re not the one we paid to see.’ It takes that away.”
The full-time ABS format had several problems. The electronic strike zones seemed different in each ballpark, said Dick Scott, manager of the Syracuse Mets, adding that the umpire’s reduced role made everything awkward: “When the hitter didn’t like the call, the bench would start barking and the umpire would just point at his ear like ‘That’s what they’re telling me.’ It was … too generic. The challenge system is good for everybody. It makes the umpires focus. It’s still pressure, but I think umpires are better than people think they are.”
“We’re in the entertainment business, and you don’t want to get rid of the human element,” said Toby Gardenhire, manager of the St. Paul Saints, a Minnesota Twins affiliate. “But if you get a 3-2 count in the bottom of the seventh inning with the bases loaded and the game’s on the line, what you don’t want is for a really bad pitch that’s off the plate to get called strike three. Now at least we have the ability to make a challenge.”
These managers all hinted at something without quite saying it: The interaction with an umpire — the ability to complain and be heard by a human who’s in charge, rather than one who’s subservient to a machine — is vital. After all, baseball is a noisy game, full of chatter. In sports where such back-and-forth isn’t so integral, humans are already being replaced. Racing sports such as track and swimming surrendered most officiating to machines decades ago, and tennis has followed suit on line calls, retaining just a chair umpire. Bennis officials aren’t entwined in the aesthetics of their game the way umpires are in baseball. Nor, for that matter, are referees in football, basketball, and hockey. The controversies in NFL and NBA officiating seem endless, but if their referees were replaced by technology, it’s hard to believe many fans would miss their presence, even though they take over the stadium’s PA system to explain calls.
The real cautionary tale of technological encroachment in sports right now involves soccer, where referees play an outsize role in matches, often deciding the outcome of a game with one call or non-call. The video assistant referee was designed to help them, yet it has worsened the viewing and playing experience. As the instant-replay system checks every goal in slow motion, it often finds insignificant fouls or violations a referee wouldn’t have called in real time — to the detriment of the game. Plus, the mandatory check can take several minutes before a decision is reached, which kills the stadium vibe among fans and players in a sport known for its tense buildups and eruptions of euphoria.
Researchers have found high distrust of VAR. Fans of underdog soccer teams view the technology as something stacked against them and suspect it’s being used for the benefit of bigger teams and bigger stars — just as many football fans claim the Kansas City Chiefs benefit from generous refereeing. Studies have shown that fans largely view human mistakes as part of the drama and debate of the game and that VAR both drains soccer of authenticity and sanitizes it: Every sports fan learns early on that feeling cheated by incompetent refs is a timeless, comforting excuse following a loss.
That seemed to be one reason full-time ABS felt wrong. While the use of “robo-umps” is an admission of human fallibility, isn’t fallibility central to the fun of sports in general? Any game whose outcome is certain isn’t worth playing. Also, there is something undignified about a human — especially the self-assured umpire type — becoming subservient to a machine.
Historian Surekha Davies recently wrote, “By deciding what robots are for, we are defining what humans are.” Human labor, with its imperfections, is increasingly viewed as a costly, unreliable obstacle to an optimized society — hence all the self-service checkout kiosks and the ubiquity of ChatGPT. But the rise of machines leaves people uneasy. To borrow from Russian literature, what umpires really represent is the same notion Dostoyevsky was getting at in Notes From Underground: embracing irrationality over utopia as the price of salvaging the soul. Free will (and its capacity for even atrocious decision-making) is what makes us human.
Even though the league had enough leverage in labor negotiations with the umpires union to win the right to test and implement ABS, league officials seem mindful of what umpires bring to the game — at least for now.
“There’s a deep philosophical question embedded in this test that I think is causing strong reactions from baseball fans and the people around the game,” Sword said. “What is the virtue of getting every call right, exactly? And is that the goal? It’s a more difficult question than you would think.”
James Earl Jones’s point about baseball in Field of Dreams is that it helps mark time in a changing world. And baseball’s many changes throughout the past century reflect society’s changes: desegregation; the cultural turn westward; and, more recently, optimization and shorter attention spans. Change has made baseball’s constancy possible. But as the sport hugs technology ever closer, its greatest assets are still what they always were: wood bats, leather balls and gloves, and a bunch of humans chatting, cheering, yelling at, and booing one another.
