Robot Refs Are on the Horizon

Like the rest of us struggling to justify why AI can’t do our jobs, major league referees and umpires have found themselves genuinely at risk of being replaced by robots.

Major League Baseball has started testing its Automated Ball Strike (ABS) system in Spring Training games, which lets players challenge individual pitch calls. A hitter, pitcher or catcher can simply tap their head to indicate a challenge and within a few seconds, the system sends word on whether the pitch was a ball or strike.

Each team gets two challenges per game. If it's successful, you keep your challenge, if you’re wrong, you lose it.

ABS has already been tested in the Minor Leagues in small stints — and will be fully implemented this season in Triple A — but this Spring Training has marked the first time big leaguers have been able to call bullshit on a strike three call that didn’t go their way.

So far, it’s been a hit. Players have liked it, and unlike drawn out replay reviews for calls on the bases, the challenges don’t take forever to complete.

While the ABS system isn’t coming to the big leagues next year, another sport

is

handing the wheel to the robots in 2025: The NFL just announced that it will have an automated system make first down calls next season.

First of all, it has always seemed ridiculous that the richest sports league in the world — with an army of drones, technology and cinema quality cameras — has relied on a 60-year old man standing 30 yards away to spot first downs. It is archaic.

If you ask a Buffalo Bills fan, it cost them a chance at the Super Bowl this year. It must be something about the Bills, but it seems like anytime they lose in the playoffs on a controversial rule, the league gets rid of it the next year (overtime coin toss rule ring a bell?).

Either way, this is a good change. It's insane that it's taken this long, but still, we’ll take the win.

With two of the biggest sports leagues in the world leaning more on tech to police games, bad calls could start feeling nostalgic.

Pretty soon, we’re gonna be telling our kids about the good ol’ days when we were allowed to scream at our TVs over blown calls. We’ll preach about the glory of watching players, coaches and managers relentlessly bark at umpires and refs.

One of the best parts of watching a baseball game is the chance of seeing a good ejection. There’s nothing like watching an umpire toss a player or manager and having to stand there and take a hurricane of shit-talking, dirt-kicking and finger-pointing.

Yes, of course it's better to get the calls right, but getting worked up over a bad call has been ingrained in the identity of sports fans forever. It almost seems sacrilegious to take that away from us.

All things considered, it sucks when outcomes aren’t determined by players. We want to see games end honestly based on performances, not blown calls.

If handing the reins over to the robots to call balls and strikes and spot first downs properly gets us there, then we shouldn’t stand in their way.