Calling balls and strikes is not easy. Some umpires are better than others, of course. Major League hitters appear to have a better eye of for the strike zone than umpires do, and that’s a problem. As much as Bronx Cheer likes to defend umpires, sometimes it can’t. Wendelstedt had a terrible game on Thursday. Baseball has made great strides in cracking down on the strike zone, but it needs to do more. The Twins, not the umpires, probably lost the game Thursday night, but the uncertainty in that statement reflects a problem.
By isolating the discussion on the 1-2 pitch to Berkman, the media do themselves and the larger point a disservice. The controversy is not about that one missed pitch. Any umpire can miss one pitch. The problem lies in Wendelstedt’s terrible strike zone all night. He called a pitch right down the middle a ball. Jeff Passan has a good, if Twins-slanted, takedown. A strike zone that bad cannot happen in a playoff game.
Boorstein is, as he explained here, as big a fan, follower and defender of sports officials as anyone I’ve ever met. It’s pretty weird. But it appears the umpiring and instant replay discussion is going to keep coming up until some sort of clear resolution is reached, and clear resolutions have never been the forte of Bud Selig’s office. So Tom’s a pretty good guy to go to for this stuff since he’s been following umpiring since way before it was cool.
It strikes me — pardon the pun — that ball-and-strikes duties are the aspect of umpiring that could most easily be replaced by computers or a robot, and it wouldn’t even require cutting back the number of umpires since you’d still need a guy standing there to make calls at home plate and rule on hit batsmen and checked swings, etc.
Probably not something that will happen soon or be implemented without hiccups. And I’m not even sure it’s something that should happen; I really haven’t thought it all the way through.
But Major League Baseball has to find a way to diminish umpire error if it’s affecting the strike zone so much that it impacts the outcome of games. Yes, the human element is part of the game and all that. But no one’s arguing that the players be replaced by machines (although Transformers baseball would be pretty awesome to watch). It’s just about making baseball more fair for the humans competing in it.
Also — and Tom doesn’t get at this, but I’ve discussed it before — I’m shocked by how many people seem certain that umpiring has gotten worse and how few consider that umpiring may have been equally bad forever and we’ve only recently come into new technologies that allow us to more thoroughly and frequently judge the way the game is called.
Now we watch games in high definition with a dozen super-slow-mo replay angles. We see for certain when umpires are wrong on calls we might have shrugged off as questionable or close just a few years ago.
Tedquarters 
We now know through the use of advanced technology exactly where a ball crosses the plate at the instant the ball crosses the plate. Why we aren’t using this technology to determine balls and strikes is absurd.
Look, when I played whiffle ball growing up, we used a lawn chair behind the batter as the strike zone. Because that’s all we had. And nobody would argue if it hit the chair because those were the rules. If we had something better (a third person that didn’t want to play) we might have used him. MLB has something better than a person (or a lawn chair) and they don’t use it because of tradition. Seems like a bad reason.
Did you use the rule that if the ball hit the lawn chair and the guy didn’t swing it was an automatic out? We didn’t have that rule on our block and I never knew about it until I got to college and started playing intramural Wiffle Ball, but it makes it pretty fun.
If you have a good rising fastball (as I do), you can really flummox hitters approaching Wiffle ball like baseball. One time, when facing some real jockish-looking team, I struck out the side on three pitches. The last guy threw the bat in frustration and they were forced to forfeit. Highlight of my athletic career.
Not an automatic out. We still did three strikes (and didn’t count balls, but there was a sort of gentleman’s agreement that you couldn’t just keep throwing crap out of the hitting zone). Making it an automatic out seems like a great adjustment. The problem with the chair strike zone is that it takes some of the effectiveness out of the good slider against same-handed because it usually hits the batter.
The rising fastball was a key pitch but you need to keep it under the top of the chair. And if you could hit it, it went a long, long way. I specialized in a particularly nasty 12-6 curveball learned from obsessing over Dwight Gooden’s every start. Of course throwing that pitch hundreds of times a day, every summer, it was probably the cause of me tearing apart the ligaments in my elbow and breaking my arm, Dave Dravecky style when I was 14. Oh well, it was completely worth it.
I’d have to argue that a bit. What technology out there can tell instantly if it was a ball or strike? Fast enough that it would not delay the game at all. Those K’zone and pitch tracker things on TV are not official or exact.
I think to much technology would pretty much kill the game. I say just leave it the way it is, with umpires, just give each team some sort of challenge or two (but not on balls and strikes).
Umps make mistakes and always will, and more ofthen than not they have no effect on the outcome of the game, so there is no need to review everything. But as we’ve seen, there are instances where blown calls have been HUGE and costly. Giving each coach a challenge or two, to use if one of those huge spots arises would solve the issue IMO, and take some of the pressure off these umps. Its almost unfair to them now that they have to so it real time while everyone gets to criticize them using slow mo and 76 differnet angles.
I’m not a fan of any challenges idea because for the vast majority of blown calls you only know it is a “huge” spot long after the game ended. The blown call last night at 2B is only a big deal because the the run scored two batters later.
I also don’t understand the logic that the computer is not official or exact. The umpires we have now aren’t exact. The technology we have is better (more accurate, more consistent) than a human umpire. And I think it would be just as fast if done the right way. Have the result flash on the jumbotron and a ball strike call played over the PA.