Technology, Corporate America and The Automated Strike Zone
How far should you trust any of them?
If you watch enough TV, by now you’re aware of the miracle of self-driving cars which will allow us to quit paying attention to where we’re going while blasting down the highway in a Two-and-a-Half-Ton Death Machine and clapping along with Queen’s We Will Rock You which, considering the possible outcomes of that particular activity, is darkly appropriate.
BTW: I don’t know anybody who actually wants to do this in Real Life and it has been suggested by people smarter than me (and there are an unlimited number of candidates who fit that description) that the real reason the automobile industry is all worked up about Self-Driving Cars is if they can make them work, Corporate America can fire all the drivers they currently employ, make even more money and give their CEO another pay raise.
Timeout for a cynical digression about Corporate America
It seems to me that Corporate America has learned to market their Darkest Impulses and Most Evil Ideas as Wonderful Favors they’re doing for us, the American Public.
For instance: the drive to install a 5G network, which a number of people have pointed out was actually done to provide more bandwidth to industries that want to employ robots so they can fire even more workers.
Aaaannnd…
Self-checkout counters which they market as being for our convenience and if they can get enough of us to ring up our purchases and bag them ourselves Corporate America can once again fire a shit-ton of cashiers and I’m guessing the savings won’t be used to make the crap we buy any cheaper.
They’ll keep the savings for themselves because you never know when Jeff Bezos is going to need to build yet another penis-shaped rocket.
Also…
My TV is now trying to sell me a watch I can put on my wrist and it will record how far I run (like that’s ever going to happen) and the length of my non-existent running stride and when I swim, whether I’m doing a backstroke or a breast stroke and how well I’m sleeping and whether or not I just got in a car accident and I’m guessing since it measures everything else, it will also keep track of how often the people who wear one of these watches have sex and whether “the horse jumped over the fence” at the finish (if you get my drift) and for your information (I mean everybody else is invading my privacy, why not you?) my “horse” can still do that, but these days it needs a running start and wants to smoke a pack of cigarettes afterwards.
And what do you suppose Corporate America is going to do with all that information they’re collecting about the rest of us?
Nothing evil, I’m sure.
Anyway…
A few years back I drew a cartoon about bears that used to have tracking devices stapled to their ears, but were now being given smartphones instead and the only thing I got wrong is the idea that anyone would give a bear a free smartphone.
In reality they’d make the bear pay for the smartphone himself and the people who were afraid to get vaccinated in case someone injected them with a tracking device are out of their damn minds because while our privacy is being invaded, we’re the ones paying for it when we buy smartphones and put them in our pockets next to our genitals and I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before mine start to glow in the dark.
Which, come to think of it, will be pretty handy, so once again we owe Corporate America a big thank you.
Back to those self-driving cars
According to a semi-recent study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a substantial number of drivers treat their cars as “fully self-driving” while in reality they’re only “partly automated” which goes to show that maybe you ought to take a few minutes and read the owner’s manual before setting the cruise control at 85 and cranking up the Stones’ Honky Tonk Women to 11.
(And yes, that’s a Spinal Tap reference and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch this video.)
Here’s what IIHS president David Harkey had to say about self-driving cars:
“The big-picture message here is that the early adopters of these systems still have a poor understanding of the technology’s limits.”
According to the following article, there were 392 documented crashes involving cars using driver-assistance technology throughout a 10 month period between July 2021 and May 2022:
https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/article267180096.html
The article suggests that maybe advertising has something to do with peoples’ incorrect perception of their car’s capabilities and it’s not exactly unheard of for people who develop new technology and want to make money off it, to oversell what that technology can do.
Which brings us to the other two-thirds of today’s subject…
Automated Strike Zones and the Limits of Technology
The first thing you might notice about the strike zones shown on your TV during a baseball game is that most of them are two-dimensional – set up vertically on what at least theoretically is the front edge of home plate (more on that in a moment) – but in reality strike zones are three-dimensional and shaped like a pentagon hovering magically over the entire plate from the bottom of the batter’s knees to the mid-point of his chest.
Timeout for a mid-rant correction
OK, my assumption that the TV strike zone is set up at the front edge of home plate was encouraged by all the announcers who have said the TV strike zone is set up at the front edge of home plate, but a tweet by Alex Freedman who, according to his Twitter account, is the Broadcast/Communications director of the Oklahoma City Dodgers, says this is the reference sheet MLB provided teams in the Pacific Coast League when the Automated Ball-Strike system was implemented there and take a look because a couple things jump out at me:
It would appear the strike zone being used is a two-dimensional vertical rectangle so that part seems to be right, but it’s set up in the middle of the plate, not the front, and the top and bottom of the zone are defined by percentages of a batter’s height which totally ignores batting stances because some guys like to crouch and some guys like to stand straight up and here’s the definition of the strike zone from the MLB rulebook and I put the part that matters in bold type:
“The STRIKE ZONE is that 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 kneecap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.”
So they seem to be ignoring their own rule book, but adjusting the strike zone for a 6-foot guy who likes to crouch and a 6-foot guy who likes to stand straight up sounds like a pain in the ass, so just do it off their height (which players have been known to lie about) and hope nobody asks any inconvenient questions.
Every once in a while your TV will show a three-dimensional strike zone and the ball’s path through it which is theoretically more accurate, but not every broadcast does this and I’m guessing (but it’s a really good guess) that’s because it’s harder to do it that way, so to hell with it, just show the yokels at home the two-dimensional version and pretend that a ball that missed it, missed the entire strike zone.
Now here’s an article on that:
https://www.closecallsports.com/2019/09/the-2d-tv-computer-strike-zones-3d.html
My initial impression was that backdoor breaking pitches (pitches that start outside the strike zone that might break into the back part of the zone behind the front edge of home plate) were the pitches ABS would struggle with, but if the strike zone is actually set up in the middle of the plate, balls that clip the front part of the zone and then drop (think any pitch with downward movement like changeups, sinkers and breaking pitches) might be missed as well.
Bottom line: just because your TV says that pitch was a ball, doesn’t necessarily make it so.
Finding up-to-date information on how automated strike zones actually work is frustrating, but here’s an article from 2002 that explains some of the technical problems; like tracking a ball accurately when it’s raining or when the ball goes in and out of shadows.
http://baseball.physics.illinois.edu/TrackingBaseballs.pdf
But let’s give baseball the benefit of the doubt because they’ve had twenty years to work on it since that last article came out, so the real question is how well does the technology work right now and if you read this article from the Cincinnati Enquirer, written in April of this year, the answer is not so hot.
They used an automated ball-strike system at the low-A level and here’s what player Allan Cerda had to say about it:
“There were some balls that touched the ground, in the dirt, and the system called it a strike anyway. I didn’t really like it as much. You just kind of look at the umpire, like, ‘hey, what’s going on?’ He’s like, ‘hey, sorry, the machine told me that’s what the call was.’ There is really nothing you can do about it.”
I’m under the impression that umpires will be able to overrule the system when the system screws up, which we’re supposed to find comforting, but tells you that system screwing up is not out of the realm of possibility.
Also:
The league decided there were too many walks, so they changed the automated strike zone in the middle of the season. It was widened by two inches on each side and shortened by three inches at the top of the strike zone and you can argue about the size of the strike zone and mostly I won’t give a crap, because the important thing to remember is the strike zone can be manipulated and has to calibrated correctly and who knows if that’s being done often enough and whether it was set up right in the first place.
And finally…
Here’s an article from the baseballscouter website (undated, so I’ve got no idea when it was written) that says it’s hard to know just how accurate automated ball-strike systems actually are because the people who make them do not provide enough information and if that’s true it kinda reminds me of the scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy is advised to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
https://baseballscouter.com/baseball-strike-zone-on-tv/
Some people who seem to be either unaware or ignoring its limitations are demanding that automated strike zones replace human umpires because humans make mistakes so let’s turn calling balls and strikes over to the computers and get human error out of the equation, which brings up one of those inconvenient questions:
Who programs the computers?
In conclusion…
Trying to inform yourself about the accuracy of automated strike zones is complicated because when you google this stuff you get a variety of articles from a variety of sources and the articles may have been written when dinosaurs roamed the Earth or by someone who’s kissing MLB’s ass or trying to promote automated ball-strike systems or cranks like me and so far MLB hasn’t done much to clear all this up.
So it’s hard for baseball fans to figure out just how accurate those automated strike zones are, but what we know for sure is two-dimensional strike zones are incomplete which also makes them inaccurate.
And maybe you shouldn’t take your hands off the steering wheel when listening to Queen.
Wow, I had no idea about how faulty computerized strike zones can be. I'm one who yelled at the umpire on my TV for being so blind. Thanks for opening my eyes!