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Ask Slashdot: Project Scope For MLB Robot Umpires?
nightcats writes "The League Championship Series of baseball are upon us, and numerous sports media pundits, armies of fans at comment boards, and TV people are openly debating the possibility of robot umpires coming to Major League Baseball, to either replace or enhance the human umps' work on the field. Question: what kind of project are we reasonably talking about here? What would the scope and length be from planning/design to user testing/implementation (presumably in a spring training/minor league setting)? What kinds of hardware (video scanners, touch-sensitive bases/foul lines, etc.) and software would be required?"
And, as long as we're on the subject — do you think it would be good for the game?
There goes your excuse for calling the umpire an idiot.
My opinion? See above.
Pretty much everything could be accomplished using cameras, and software like Hawkeye (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk-Eye).
This is what they use in tennis to track balls moving well over 200km/h. It is supposedly accurate to within the fuzz on the tennis ball. This can handle strikes/balls, foul calls, home runs, and potentially even tag-outs.
The technology is there. I remember hearing that it took a trailer full of electronics to draw the first-down line in football a decade ago, and now it can be run on a high end laptop.
In baseball, with the rising number of incorrect calls at the plate, I'm all for electronic verification. We saw a perfect game (or was it a no-hitter...) stolen last year by a bad call at first base. The strongest argument against using these techniques is that it increases the barrier to entry for kids to "really" be playing the game they see on TV. With sports like soccer, options like these are rarely considered for this reason. To match what the kids see on TV, they need a few posts, a ball, and maybe their favorite player's jersey. Add cameras, and you've added an element no child can hope to include in their own game with their friends.
But all that's changed in tennis is McEnroe's endless rants about bad line calls. Tennis has never been better. Umpires should still call out/safe calls, but ball/strike should have been given to a computer long ago, especially seeing what an inconsistent job the umps do at it.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Most broadcasts now have a "pitch zone" and you can watch the umps get it wrong regularly enough that robotic calls and strikes could be useful.
Sorry, you'd rather have the umpire rule incorrectly against your team sometimes, because it pisses you off when it happens, and you want sport to piss you off sometimes. Is that really what you're saying?
Frankly, as far as I see it, the point of a spectator sport is to allow you to get behind a group of people who are really good at what they do, and hope that they do really well against other similar groups. I don't think incorrect enforcement of rules is a necessary part of this experience.
That first paragraph is a little dumb.
An automated system for sensing and interpreting play on a baseball diamond wouldn't really be "robotic" would it?
It would rather be a system of cameras and sensors and some calibrated displays so that close plays in the physical world could be replayed and interpreted.
(Killing Bob Costas would not only be good for baseball, but just in general make the world a better place.)
Mmmmm... first, the issue that from your words it looks like every umpire in every game in every sport is being bribed, or in risk of being. So much for conspiracy theories. There are economic interests in the game and when this happens there is always a risk of illegal behavior, ok. Jumping from that to "the system looks legit because there are too many groups trying to rig it" is quite unfounded. We know that for some people "free market" is the blanket answer to every question, but this is ridiculous.
Second. Right now, if someone bribes an umpire, it cannot be proven other than by the money movement. An umpire does fail? It was not a good day for him. The fails favour only one of the sides? Bad luck. Change that against "the robot code is calibrated before the game, the SHA1 of the code compared with the official one, then calibrated again after the game and stored for independ review" and you get that cheating with robots is orders of magnitude more difficult than with human umpires. Changes in robots are traceable. An incorrect decision? Go to the program, feed the same input, find if it is a software bug or manipulation. You would need to have a signficant part of the organization in your pocket for it to work. If you think that someone can get away with it, I think it is safe to assume that "that someone" can already be owning all of the umpires, all of the officials, all of the teams, all of the games now.
Why can't
In many spectator sports, hating the ref is a big part of the fun; baseball in the USA, ice hockey in Canada, soccer in Europe (especially Italy).
Having a flawless robot instead of a ref would be like an episode of 24 where Jack Bauer is not slowed down by people of the FBI trying to arrest him while he is trying to find a nuclear bomb hidden by terrorists in downtown LA. The "enemy" would still be there but the spectator would feel cheated.
lucm, indeed.
I will gladly provide you an estimate of the scope for such a development effort. My consulting fee is $150/hour.
What, you expected people to plan your project for you gratis? Why would anyone do that? It will take days of work to properly estimate something like that.
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Give the umpire behind the plate some sort of augmented reality HUD headset that shows the strikezone and highlights the ball as it comes over the plate. The feed from the Umps headset could also be used in broadcasts. Uses technology without removing the human element of the game. I'll start working on it if MLB wants to pony up the cash...most (if not all) of it would just be COTS hardware.
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There is also the fact that most broadcasts now show a visual of the pitch location, making any cheating exceedingly obvious to the viewers.
You could probably just run the whole game on statistics and quantum probability. Despite where the ball actually fell, over the course of N games the ball was statistically most likely to fall over there, based on the records of this batter, pitcher and field. This would be less costly than "optical hardware". So all you need are past statistics and a random number generator. The number of "bad calls" would be statistically equal over time.
Gently reply
I've heard many a player interviewed when they say they're OK with umps making a mistake during the regular season because they all even out during the course of those games. During this last ALDS I thought the umps were terrible with calling balls and strikes, especially during Game 3 of NYY @ DET. There were many instances of CC Sabathia not getting strike calls when his pitches hit the edges of the strike zone (pitchers would very often get that call during the season), while Justin Verlander would get strike calls when the pitches were sailing over the inside edge of the other batter's box. Mistakes like this cannot be evened out during the course of a 5- or 7-game series; such mistakes have an obvious impact on the outcome of a series.
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Racing is judged by electronics, same with fencing, and it is used in the challenge system in tennis. It hasn't made these sports "sterile" or any less enjoyable.
There is nothing enjoyable in having your team's season ended by an incorrect call (2003 Giants vs. Niners).
It would certainly be funny to see a red-faced coach screaming at a camera that it should get its lenses cleaned and sensors calibrated.
~Syberz
Padres struck out Jeeter, he even began walking away from the plate. The ump called it foul. All video replays showed essentially a perfect pitch. Even the commentators couldn't see how it was a foul.
It essentially turned the tide of the world series as Jeter would go on to hit a home run. The Yankees had hitherto been getting their butts kicked. But when you have to pitch 4 strikes, it changes all the odds. This will eliminate a LOT of bought off umps as well.
Likewise, soccer, World Cup last year. The U.S. team won, but the ref called foul on U.S. Video replay showed NO foulable actions on the part of the U.S. However, the opposing team had three U.S. soccer players locked in bear hugs.
Yes, clearly a case of bought off ref. Who essentially affected the playoff season. One might say he's lucky, if he did that to any of the numberous fanatical football following countries he'd be a dead ump. Thankfully for his life, American's are not that big into soccer football.
As I mentioned a few lines above here, these pitch zone graphics aren't always accurate. It's a pretty complex system that needs to be calibrated properly each game, and that calibration could be affected throughout the game. In most ballparks, the camera angle isn't straight-on, so sometimes what you think you see is misleading. Not to mention the fact that the camera location is on the order of 500 feet away from the plate while the umpire is like three feet away. So while I'm under no delusions about the accuracy of umpires, I'm also not glued to the TV watching the pitch zone graphic, either.
Catchers would become a lot more useless, no longer being able to try to affect the umpire's call by moving his hand when catching the ball (to move an obvious ball to being in the strike zone), not to mention strike zones can change depending on a batter's height, stance, etc. I could, however, see them use it to judge how accurate umpires are, to at least keep them on their toes.
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Is it good for us? Robot flubs the call - it gets called a programming error and the lynch-mobs are after anyone who has a pocket protector.
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Already there. They have been installed in most stadiums for years. That's how they get the graphics to display on telecasts. They have also used this information to determine if there is racial bias in calls. http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/07/01/strike-three-do-mlb-umpires-express-racial-bias-in-calling-balls-and-strikes/ Short answer: there is slight racial bias (umpires of the same race as the pitcher give them a tiny but measurable amount of help). This bias disappears as umpires gain experience.
But why does the MLB limited it so much when there needs to be more?
I think that it's not so much about the emotion of bringing another human into the equation. My line of thinking is that the game is played by humans, and humans are imperfect, so if it's judged by humans then their imperfections cancel out. I'm thinking about the throwing controversy with Muralitharan. If it's obvious enough that the human umpire can notice it, then it's bad enough to be called. We don't need to get into specifics of how many degrees of straightening is allowed.
The flip side of the coin is that the TV coverage will use whatever computer enhancements they can get, so if the umpire does make a mistake, it's obvious to everyone, rather than just a talking point over a few beers after the game. Rather than make people try to umpire, then give them shit when they aren't as good as a computer, it's probably better to just get the computer to do it.
On the whole, I think that we do lose something by going to robotic umpires, but it'll be better for the game in the long run.
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As someone that has attended one of the two professional umpire schools in Florida and had conversations with the umpires actually working in MLB, I'd like to bring some perceptive to this. These umpires are highly trained, high paid individuals that are the cream of the crop in their profession. They are under constant scrutiny from the Umpire Supervisor (who is Charlie Reliford, an excellent umpire in his own right) and his observers who ensure they are performing to the best of their ability. Obviously, mistakes are made and with instant replay, we can relive them over and over again. Umpiring is about being in the right spot at the right time to see the play and make the call. It is 95% positioning and 5% actually calling what you see. If you aren't in the right position, that is when you get in trouble.
Back to robots and their place in the field of umpiring. I think monitoring fair/foul like in tennis and similar things is a valid application, but anything beyond that is not very feasible as proper positioning is very subjective to the situation. I'd think that some sort of eye piece with a HUD that was able to track the ball and allow the umpire to reply what he saw would be the best option for baseball. Not sure if it at all feasible, but I don't think you'd get too much opposition for the umpire association. Instant reply has problems with when should it be used, how long should it take, and the like. Nearly all plays in baseball have significance and have the chance to alter a game, especially during a close game. Baseball can already be a long game and IR would just add to it.
The official rule:
Strike Zone is the area over home plate, the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the knee cap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.
What if the robot can't see the top of my pants? (My shirt is loose and blouses over)
What if my shoulders are angled? (Where's the 'top'?)
What if I have loose pants and a locked knee stance? (Where's my knee, and thus the hollow below the cap?)
When does the robot determine the boundaries of the zone? (If it's at the windup, I'll crouch during it then stand up. If it's as the pitch comes in, I'll squat on high strikes)
A living, breathing umpire makes all these subjective decisions on every pitch. There's no way to trick the umpire into giving you a smaller or undefined strike zone.
You have to keep umpires, even if there's instant replay.
For another example: on a large fraction of 6-4-3 and 4-6-3 double plays, the infielder making the play at second base doesn't actually tag the bag. Umpires are very generous on the player touching the base on the turn. Relying on a robot to make that call would be incredibly disruptive with the way that call has been made for over a century.
(goddamn it, I wasn't logged in) The official rule: Strike Zone is the area over home plate, the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the knee cap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball. What if the robot can't see the top of my pants? (My shirt is loose and blouses over) What if my shoulders are angled? (Where's the 'top'?) What if I have loose pants and a locked knee stance? (Where's my knee, and thus the hollow below the cap?) When does the robot determine the boundaries of the zone? (If it's at the windup, I'll crouch during it then stand up. If it's as the pitch comes in, I'll squat on high strikes) A living, breathing umpire makes all these subjective decisions on every pitch. There's no way to trick the umpire into giving you a smaller or undefined strike zone. You have to keep umpires, even if there's instant replay. For another example: on a large fraction of 6-4-3 and 4-6-3 double plays, the infielder making the play at second base doesn't actually tag the bag. Umpires are very generous on the player touching the base on the turn. Relying on a robot to make that call would be incredibly disruptive with the way that call has been made for over a century.
Don't the human umpires rely on optical sensors?
Its part of the game. However I can see using the computers to see how often umpires bad calls and getting rid of bad umpires.
Just like cheating with electronic voting machines is orders of magnitude more difficult than paper ballots?
Sorry, you'd rather have the umpire rule incorrectly against your team sometimes, because it pisses you off when it happens, and you want sport to piss you off sometimes. Is that really what you're saying?
Hey, whatever it takes to actually enjoy watching baseball. Especially on TV, without the atmosphere that comes from watching any sporting event live.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Hating the ref is not part of the game and it's that idiot mentality that ruins the game. No one goes to a game to see a ref; they go to see the players. The refs need to disappear into the background as much as possible, only surfacing long enough to halt play for rules infractions and to explain to the audience why, before disappearing again.
It would not be good for the game. Some favorite chants of the crowd would no longer be valid. No more "Kill the umpire!" or "The umpire is blind!"? You will take away a vital part of the game.
Hating the ump is not the “fun: part of the game – it’s a defense mechanism called Self Serving Bias.
Remember, the fan is the “10th player” – they contribute to the success or failure of the game. When the picture pitches and fails, the fan has two choices.
Rationally ascribe the failure to their team – and thus themselves – and recognize that they are a failure. Or they can protect their ego and blame the Ump.
A much better way to improve umpiring is a challenge/replay system like other sports have implemented for the purpose of reversing the most egregious calls. There is already a system in place to use replay to check home run calls but nothing else.
There are a lot of issues that would have to be considered in order to implement a system in baseball. Foul balls called fair can easily be reversed since everything resets back on a foul ball but you can't always go the other way and reverse a fair ball (in the case of a home run but that is already addressed now) that was called foul since the foul call stopped all action at that point. Reversing a call at first is trivial in many situations but not always (a third out will stop all action but if it is reversed and others are on base, they could have moved to other bases or scored on a safe call).
Football has some of the issues but usually the thing that is challenged are play stoppage issues anyway (was the ball carrier down before the fumble, was the receiver in bounds, did the ball cross the plane of the goal line).
No matter where you go, there you are.
Any true baseball fan knows that interaction of the players and the coaches with the umpire really adds to the dynamics of the game. To quote Mark Grace, "That's Big League!"
yea but you can't do that for balls/strikes and that is a huge part of the problem. Also, having automated fair/foul would be good because you wouldn't be stopping the play. If you replay and a foul call turns out to be fair, you end up with the problem of where to put the runner, would he have made it to second on that ball? If the fair/foul call is automated the play would proceed normally.
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With all the high speed multiple angles on all bases - why the hell don't they at least use instant replay. We've all seen the bad game changing calls. Time for that to end.
Pitch f/x can already be used to determine balls and strikes. It may not be perfect, but it's a darn sight better than the inconsistent strike zones we see on a regular basis. Right now each umpire has his own strike zone - and some even talk about it as if the definition of the zone is their own rather than what's defined in the rulebook.
Alternatively - if we could just get rid of C.B. Bucknor the average quality of baseball umpiring would go up dramatically.
FWIW I used to be against any sort of automated ball/strike determination, but I've seen so many bad calls I've come around.
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You can use cameras to detect ball location around strike zone. Get rid you that responsibility.
Nearly every play can be called automatically.
It's the close tags that are the only real issue.
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In many spectator sports, hating the ref is a big part of the fun
The inconsistency of umpires is one of the reasons I stopped watching baseball. It isn't fun at all. It takes away from the competitiveness of the game.
Hey, nobody protests when we decide elections by voting machines!
Any true baseball fan wants the outcome determined solely by the players and the coaches. Umpire mistakes are no different than fan interference and diminish the purity of the game.
There goes your excuse for calling the umpire an idiot.
Not really. Human or electronic the umpire will be "confronted". "Hey ump clean your glasses" becomes "Hey IT clean the ump's optical sensor", "That umpire has been bought" becomes "That umpire has been hacked".
Just like cheating with electronic voting machines is orders of magnitude more difficult than paper ballots?
Uh? Where did you get that analogy from? Can you get your money back?
I'll write my second paragraph AGAIN, but this time a little slower so ANYBODY can get it...
This article is about providing help to decide about something that can be difficult to evaluate (was the ball received before or after the base was reached? was it thrown well enough?) Put two umpires to evaluate a situation, you can get two different answers and it does not mean any of them is not honest (subjectivity). This subjectivity meant a loss of accountability(bad faith decisions can be masked as honest errors), offset by the fact that the games are in public and recently saved so an obvious interference could be noticed and acted upon.
With ballots, there are clearer rules (the ballot goes for A, for B, is void....). So, the "fact" can be easily stated (objectivity). Accountability was the usual problem, and it was obtained by mixing enough people in the process so it would be difficult to all of them to agree to anything (not that it did always work).
In the first case, the issue to treat was subjectivity / point of view, and that solution will mean that certain additional accountability measures are to be set. In the second one, accountability.
In essence, you are comparing solutions designed to solve different problems. It is like saying that trucks are useless because it is more efficient for you to commute in a compact car. That is missleaded enough, but you are also ignoring that there are electronic voting solutions that provide "old-fashioned" accountability by receipt printing.
I hope to have answered your question...
Why can't
We could do this today. They have enough HD cameras watching the game and can play anything back in slow motion to make sure every call is 100% accurate. Part of the game IS umpires making bad calls. Sorry but that's true, otherwise they would have been replaced with cameras years ago.
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Why stop with just robot umpires? Why not robot players? Robot bats? Robot fans?
Part of the allure of baseball for many fans is that it is a pure sport that hasn't dramatically changed for over 100 years (certainly there have been advances in player training, in the ball, and in bat design, but those are fairly minor compared to the changes in many other sports). While a robot umpire would perhaps be more "accurate," it wouldn't make baseball a better game because it would be fundamentally making it a different game.
Eventually we'll see an entire robot EVERYTHING on the team, and i'll tune in to watch the fights.
Not to self-promote (or self-congratulate) but I wrote a story 5 years ago about just this subject, and even produced it as an audio play. It's free to listen at http://planetretcon.com/blog/?p=32
I even set the story in 2011, though my reasoning was that 2011 was 5 years in the future from the time of production. The software works after some initial bugs, but there's just one final bug they can't correct.
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> Hating the ref is not part of the game and it's that idiot mentality that ruins the game
I don't know what game is ruined. As far as I can tell, the only thing that is ruined is discussion when someone see peopsle with a different opinion as having an "idiot mentality".
lucm, indeed.
You should have seen it!
I'm just imagining Lou Piniella shouting at a robot umpire, taking off his cap, throwing it on the ground at the robot's feet, picking up a base, throwing it down the right field line, picking up the robot ump, carrying it with him, throwing the base some more, and repeating.
You are certainly wrong about that. I can remember Curt Schilling taking a bat to one of those "purity" camera devices and the crowd cheered.
I make a good bit of coin betting on pro sports, and participating in fantasy sports leagues. Removing the refs from pro baseball would blow an effective statistical model I've been using for nearly a decade. I've been pretty successful at predicting per game performances for pitchers (especially strike counts) in MLB by correlating the races of the homeplate umpire and the pitcher in question, and if the umpires are replaced by non-racially biased computers, I lose that edge. Unfortunately, somebody has twigged to my model. If this study gets picked up by the press, it might be enough to overcome some of the doubts about robot refs in pro sports, and pave the way for automated officiating.
Why stop with just robot umpires? Why not robot players? Robot bats? Robot fans?
Part of the allure of baseball for many fans is that it is a pure sport that hasn't dramatically changed for over 100 years (certainly there have been advances in player training, in the ball, and in bat design, but those are fairly minor compared to the changes in many other sports). While a robot umpire would perhaps be more "accurate," it wouldn't make baseball a better game because it would be fundamentally making it a different game.
The "purity" of baseball is a myth. Take off the rose-colored glasses and wake up and smell the game-throwing, steroid abusing, racially-biased, and ethically bankrupt reality that is MLB. To cite this fantasy purity as justification for not bringing in a machine that actually *is* pure in the sense you are using the word is fucking ludicrous.
I am all for instant replay and using as much tech as possible to determine EXACTLY what happened at the plate and in the field of play.
But I don't believe that the foreseeable future holds any means of calling a balk.
It isn't the usual calls that are the problem. It is the infrequent ones. Balk. Infield-fly rule. Base runner interference. Batter interfering with the catcher's throw. Pitcher doctoring the ball. Batter using too much pine tar.
These little elements are rules just outside of what could be programmed, IMHO.
Does baseball really need a robot saying 'Strike one'? How about a robot pitcher? Or a robot manager doing all those cool signals that looks like dancing?