In what is starting to feel like an annual event, headlines during the first week of the 2026 Major League Baseball season centered on the introduction of a new rule or innovation. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged the league to speed up the pace of play, leading to a permanent rule change — namely, the use of ghost runners on second base in extra innings. The next two seasons saw a handful of minor tweaks, including the National League’s long-awaited (and much-debated) adoption of the designated hitter in 2022, but a windfall came in 2023. MLB’s newly formed Joint Competition Committee ushered in a number of core game-play rules, from a ban on the infield shift to the implementation of larger bases and a pitch clock. After additional refinements in 2024 and 2025, this current season has introduced a massive change: the application of the automated ball-strike (ABS) system to MLB game play.
Experimentation with ABS began in 2019 at the lower levels of professional baseball. By 2023 the system had been implemented across Triple-A. There was, of course, debate about how it should be used, much of it centering on the history and nature of the strike zone. According to “The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract” (2001), the definition of the strike zone belonged to a flurry of rule changes in the 1880s. In the preceding years, hitters had been allowed to dictate the location of a pitch — say, a high or a low ball. Yet, in 1887, the strike zone was set basically from the shoulders to the knees. This iteration lasted until 1950, when the zone was shrunk from the armpits to the top of the knee. Additional changes would come in 1963, 1969, 1988, and 1996, ultimately settling on a zone from mid-torso to just below the kneecap. Of course, even as the strike zone crystallized, umpires didn’t necessarily call balls and strikes in accordance with it. When pitch-by-pitch tracking began in 2008, it was revealed that the called strike zone was shorter and wider than the rules specified. Rightly or wrongly, umpires were exercising personal judgment in how they called the game.
In the nearly two decades since the implementation of digital pitch tracking, umpiring has slowly but surely been brought in line with the official strike zone. According to MLB, umpires were correct 84.1% of the time in 2008, a number that swelled to almost 93% in 2025. Still, there was an outcry for even greater accuracy or, we might say, optimal accuracy. As a result, the application of the ABS system emerged as an imperative. The technology was available. Each stadium was already equipped with Hawk-Eye — a computer vision system, owned by the Japanese conglomerate Sony, capable of tracking movement on the baseball field. Currently, five Hawk-Eye cameras at each stadium are dedicated to tracking pitches at 300 frames per second, allowing them to read spin, velocity, and of course pitch location. This is the technical basis of the ABS system.
Still, another step was needed to make it fully functional. Prior to ABS, umpires had to make a number of critical assessments when determining a player’s strike zone, including the height and stance of each hitter. Thus two hitters, each six feet in height but employing distinct stances, theoretically have different strike zones, depending on the discretion of the umpire. The new ABS system seemingly cuts through this problem. First, the height of each player is measured and, with it, his particular strike zone: “For all hitters, the top end of their zone will be 53.5% of their measured height, and the bottom will be 27% of that height.” Strike zones, in other words, are now strictly proportional to the players’ heights. This optimization has also been extended to where the ball crosses the plate. After a number of tests, it was determined that each player’s strike zone should be set two-dimensionally at the midpoint of home plate — 8.5 inches from the pentagonal side closest to the pitcher.
With ABS technology in place, and the methodology precisely established, on what grounds could the new system be resisted? Indeed, it was now a matter of how, not if. Intriguingly, MLB opted for a challenge system rather than full robo-umps. This was an explicit compromise. Testing had shown that the exclusive use of ABS would lead to more walks, longer games, and a diminished emphasis on the human component in baseball (for example, the catcher’s ability to “frame” pitches). Thus, the ABS system would be utilized on a limited basis, depending on a variety of factors, including the discretion of the players in question and the number of challenges that are upheld. This has the added benefit of incorporating a new human skill into baseball–that of knowing when to challenge, and when to accept, the call in question.
The precarious balance between human and machine, illuminatingly encapsulated in MLB’s ABS system, is loaded with philosophical implications. This is a topic that I’m interested in as an academic, but it’s also one that’s directly impacting baseball at every level. In April 2023, I wrote about the introduction of pitch clocks into baseball, albeit with an eye to what this change says about the juxtaposition of the game’s theoretical eternity with the modern West’s obsession with time. Occasionally this tension is surprising. In one of the best scenes from “Moneyball” (2011), the much-celebrated film based on Michael Lewis’ book of the same name, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) explains to his players that winning baseball exploits the game’s innate timelessness:
This scene is given an inspirational gloss in the film, but as Beane’s analytical principles took root in the mid- to late 2000s, problems followed. The length of games crept over three hours. Walks multiplied, as did strikeouts. Further, with more hitters running deeper (3-2, 2-2) counts, fewer balls were put in play, and batting averages plummeted. The idea of stringing together multiple hits or of playing small ball (bunting, stealing bases, etc.) appeared positively antediluvian. It seemed that hitters were simply waiting for pitchers to make a mistake, so that they could hit a home run. Already a deliberate game, baseball now seemed downright ponderous.
The introduction of pitch clocks was meant to redress these issues, but, in the process, something was lost. A leisurely game, baseball serves as an antidote to the modern, technocentric idea that tangible value has to be squeezed out of every drop of our lives — that, in other words, we have to be plugged in and available at all times. Ironically, this is a point that MLB itself has emphasized. Consider, for example, the recurring MLB at Field of Dreams specialty game, which is played in Dyersville, Iowa, not far from the filming site of the iconic baseball movie “Field of Dreams” (1989). With aerial shots of cornfields and announcers dressed in 1920s attire, MLB at Field of Dreams was an explicitly nostalgic production, intended to call to mind the style and pace of the game’s past. In moving to pitch clocks, MLB has effectively wanted to have it both ways, celebrating the game’s roots while facilitating the far more mundane goal of quicker television broadcasts.
The same thing is true of the recent switch to the ABS system. While the goal is to use the technology at hand to deliver a better product on the field, here again something is inevitably lost. For example, a recent article in The Athletic points out that, roughly a month into the season, the MLB walk rate is at its highest in 70 years. The reason why is simple: the strike zone is now rigidly defined and enforced. Gone are the days when an Eric Gregg or a Phill Cuzzi could put his own stamp on a game, as Gregg notoriously did in Game 5 of the 1997 NL Championship Series.
If, in years past, pitchers were able to take advantage of an umpire’s more expansive strike zone, today they must focus on the ruthlessly impassive ABS system, which is tailored to each and every hitter. Detroit Tigers pitcher Casey Mize sums it up in this way: “The hitter’s strike zone doesn’t change. I face nine different strike zones. The catcher sees nine different strike zones. The hitter just has his own.”
In an era defined by dominant pitching, one might well argue that robo-umps are providing a much-needed corrective, allowing hitters to control the strike zone with more confidence. At the same time, however, it is palpably ironic that the ABS system is driving up walk rates, since an intended benefit of pitch clocks was to increase the rate of balls in play. Still, there may be deeper challenges with ABS. Some players have complained that what robo-umps provide in terms of accuracy they take away in terms of intuition. A longstanding aspect of baseball strategy is trying to feel out the human influence on the game — the enthusiasm of the crowd, the personality of the other team, and, yes, the idiosyncrasies of the home plate umpire. As veteran San Francisco Giants pitcher Justin Verlander comments, “(The umpire) likes to call the high one, but doesn’t like to call the low one. That’s the game of baseball. I don’t want to take that away.” Moreover, it may be that this diminished sensitivity, so to speak, leaks into other facets of the game. On March 28, veteran umpire C.B. Bucknor had six calls overturned in the Cincinnati Reds 6-5 win over the Boston Red Sox. It was, admittedly, a poor performance by Bucknor, and he heard about it both in person and on social media.
Yet, as Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic points out, there is a human toll to consider as well: “Most businesses would balk at creating a system that subjects some of its employees to public embarrassment. But with its implementation of the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) challenge system this season, Major League Baseball did just that to its umpires.” A number of umpires, according to Rosenthal, are unhappy with the ABS system — and not just because it exposes their flaws in front of 30,000 people. No, the problem is that ABS holds umps publicly accountable to a standard that even the computer system cannot meet. After all, MLB is only 95% confident that a given pitch will be within 0.39 inches of where ABS locates it. Hence, while crowds rain down boos on human umps like Bucknor, robo-umps make mistakes that no one even knows about.
Philosophers of technology, doubtless, would be unsurprised at such tensions. A number of them, moreover, would caution that the more MLB yields to technological imperatives, the more these tensions will intensify. Rosenthal, in fact, is already sensing this possibility: “It’s bad enough when a good umpire is made to look foolish. It will be worse if pitchers start growing exasperated over losing strikes. And far worse if a postseason game is decided by an overturn that, due to the margin of error, might have been flat wrong.” This concern is valid, but I would argue that there is a deeper problem in view, albeit one with more subtle implications. If a fan or a player were to be asked, “Why do you love baseball?” we might expect a variety of answers. One person might say, “Because my father loved the game,” while another might offer, “Because Derek Jeter was my hero growing up.” But no one, it’s fair to say, would respond, “Because the game features an efficient pace and an optimal strike zone.”
Baseball is “America’s Pastime” not because of its links to modern technology but in spite of them. A mythical, poetic, and even religious undercurrent lies at the foundation of the game’s significance and popularity. MLB is not blind to this reality either, as the MLB at Field of Dreams game indicates. After all, it’s not a Field of Technical Efficiency but a Field of Dreams, uniquely capable of evoking the deepest longings of the human heart. Just consider, one more time, the ending of “Field of Dreams”:
In his “Memorial Address,” given in October 1955 in honor of composer Conradin Kreutzer (1780-1849), the German philosopher Martin Heidegger argues that modern human beings are experiencing a “flight from thinking.” What he means by this phrase is not that human beings aren’t thinking at all but that they are only thinking in a certain way. To illustrate this point, Heidegger distinguishes between “meditative thinking” (besinnliches Nachdenken) and “calculative thinking” (rechnendes Denken). The former seeks definite results by strategically ordering human intentions towards specific purposes. In other words, calculative thinking seeks mathematical precision and economical efficiency. By way of contrast, meditative thinking has to do with dwelling on what lies close and, in doing so, fostering a connection to tradition and a sense of place. In this sense, meditative thinking is broader than, say, prayer or mindfulness. It is closer to concentration or perhaps even to vigilance. Heidegger himself likens meditative thinking to the roots of a plant, which are needed to draw nourishment from the soil. Only then can the plant grow and thrive.
None of this, of course, means that the ABS system is a bad idea. On the contrary, MLB should be commended for doing its best to integrate it in a thoughtful manner. Still, as some ponder the day when MLB will opt for full ABS, Heidegger’s words are worth keeping in mind. If baseball, in any number of ways, should prioritize calculative efficiency over its poetic beauty and traditional import, then baseball will go the way of strip mall — impersonal, cost efficient, and ultimately forgettable.
