RoboUmp Hits the Big Leagues

Summary

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99% Invisible – "RoboUmp Hits the Big Leagues" (April 14, 2026)

Host: Roman Mars
Producer/Co-Host: Chris Berube
Guests: Katie Nolan (Baseball Analyst), Zach Helfand (New Yorker Sports Writer), Fred DeJesus (Umpire)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores Major League Baseball’s historic adoption of robot umpires—officially the Automated Balls and Strikes (ABS) system—and the wider implications of introducing technology into a tradition-heavy sport. The episode revisits a previous 99% Invisible segment on ABS in the minor leagues before updating listeners on how the system is faring in the majors in 2026.
Through expert interviews, personal anecdotes, and recent events, the show examines the design, challenges, and human element of umpiring—and what’s gained and lost when robots replace people on the field.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Why Robot Umpires? The Problem of Human Error

• Baseball’s Flawed Calls:
  • Historic example (Levan Hernandez, 1997 NLCS): Recounting a game where umpire Eric Gregg called numerous erroneous strikes, ultimately affecting the outcome and raising questions about umpiring accuracy.
    • Katie Nolan (03:20): "This pitch is, I would say, a foot, two feet outside of the strike zone. Not close, called a strike."
    • Narrator (04:00): “It was probably the worst umpiring I can remember. The outside of this strike zone, it just didn’t end.”
  • Statistics on Mistakes:
    • Roman Mars (05:56): "One study from 2018 found that umpires blow about 14 calls every game. That's 34,000 bad calls every year. And it makes a difference."

2. The Technology: Evolution from Novelty to Reality

• Early Prototypes:
  • The 1950s saw unsuccessful robot ump attempts (clunky, inaccurate, failed under certain conditions).
  • Modern systems draw from missile-tracking tech, now refined and accurate.
• What ABS Really Is:
  • Not a physical robot, but a network of high-def cameras and tracking software that instantly determines balls and strikes.
    • Zach Helfand (08:00): “What it really is, it’s this system… Actually a series of HD cameras.”
  • Already used in other sports (e.g., Hawk-Eye in tennis).

3. Design Challenges: “Textbook” vs. “Human” Strike Zones

• RoboUmp’s Early Shortcomings:
  • Initial programming adhered strictly to the rulebook, causing confusion as human umpires slightly expand the zone for hittable pitches.
    • Roman Mars (15:27): “The robot was calling a lot of hittable pitches as balls.”
  • The system was reprogrammed to better match human expectations, expanding the zone slightly to "better represent the real strike zone" (Zach Helfand, 16:03).

4. Human Element: The Unwritten Art of Umpiring

• Contextual adjustments:
  • Human umpires subtly change their calls based on weather, score, or compassion—a quality robots lack.
    • Zach Helfand (16:32): “It’s raining. Let’s move this along. Or one team is up by a lot. Let’s just go home...That’s what they call the compassionate umpire effect.”
• Baseball’s Romance with Imperfection:
  • Debate over whether absolute accuracy is desirable or if charm and unpredictability are integral to the game.
    • Narrator (16:54): “You’re taking away one of those small imperfections that makes baseball kind of romantic.”

5. Experience in the Minor Leagues: Introducing ABS

• Hybrid Human-Robot Collaboration:
  • Humans still announce the calls, using robot data via earpieces.
    • Zach Helfand (11:46): “The ball hits the glove, and a split second later you hear ‘strike’ or ‘ball.’”
    • Fred DeJesus (12:30): “I obviously couldn’t get there as a player, so I made my earpiece made. My joke is six Puerto Ricans have made it and one Puerto Rican's earpiece has made it."
  • The robot ump boosts accuracy, but minor glitches and adjustment periods exist.
    • Fred DeJesus (13:26): “It was pretty damn good. Very accurate. There were times where you would go, ooh, but again, you did what that machine wanted.”

6. Psychological and Social Effects

• Reducing Conflict and Abuse:
  • Fans and players argue less with robots, as there’s less ambiguity (and less point in heckling a machine).
    • Zach Helfand (19:41): “Fans were a lot less likely to get into arguments when they knew it was a machine making the calls.”
    • Narrator (20:36): Describes seeing a player stop himself from arguing a call, knowing it was the robot’s determination.
• Human Costs Remain:
  • Umpiring is still a tough, often thankless job, involving not just fans’ ire but sometimes violence.
    • Katie Nolan (18:07): "Imagine going to work knowing you could get a shard of wood directly into your face...The like ceiling of this job is...You make calls that get people to tell you that you suck at your job..."
    • Fred DeJesus (18:29): “I’ve got a video… where the player is saying, ‘Freddy, you’re the worst umpire in the league.’ Now he’s obviously joking, but this is what the world wants to hear. They want umpires to be ridiculed.”

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Major League Update (2026): How ABS Works Now

[24:11] – Onward to the Majors: The Challenge System

New Implementation:

• The ABS is now part of MLB as a challenge system—human umpires still call pitches, but players can appeal to the robot for a second opinion.
  • Chris Perube (24:18): “…the robot umpire has arrived in Major League Baseball, but not in the way that I was predicting…now, human umpires are still making every ball and strike call. But if a player disagrees, they can challenge the call.”
  • Roman Mars (25:04): Live narration of an ABS challenge, seeing the process play out.

How It Works:

• Teams get two ABS challenges per game; a successful challenge restores the right, so teams must be selective.
  • Chris Perube (26:29): “Each team only gets two challenges a game…but if you make a successful challenge, you get to keep it.”

Fan & Player Response:

• Players appreciate a formal avenue for recourse after questionable calls.
  • Chris Perube (27:13): “…before, if there was a bad call, they had to kind of grin and bear it…But now a few times a game, they can get a call overturned…”
• Fans are finding the new layers of drama “surprisingly fun,” as challenges are communal, real-time events.
  • Chris Perube (27:49): “It's actually creating more drama…everybody looks up at the scoreboard together…and then fans go crazy when their team is right in their challenges.”

Notable Quotes & Moments

• Roman Mars (25:04 – 25:37): [Narrating a challenge as seen on video] “…the catcher taps his helmet. Okay. And then the umpire goes to the side to check what's happening. All right…then they show a graphic of the ball just sort of hitting the bottom of the strike zone.”
• Chris Perube (25:40): “That's a really close borderline call. So the fact the catcher knew to challenge that one is impressive.”

[28:36] – The Human Cost: Spotlight on Umpires

• High-PPublic Humiliation:

  • The new system can subject umpires to embarrassing scrutiny, fueling social media pile-ons.
    • Chris Perube (28:36): “For the accurate umpires, like, doesn't really matter that much. But for the ones who make mistakes more often…there's a couple of umpires who have been genuinely humiliated…”

• "CB Buckner Incident":

  • Umpire CB Buckner becomes infamous after 6 challenged, overturned calls in a single week—inviting viral criticism and highlighting ABS’s potential to put umpires under a public microscope.
    • Chris Perube (29:34–32:11): Detailed play-by-play of Buckner’s rough week, noting race and job tenure factors in his scrutiny.

• Roman Mars (32:12): “Absolutely. He's just having the worst week ever. My sympathies, for sure.”

• Chris Perube (32:17): “...It has kind of done the opposite of what I was thinking the robot umpires would accomplish.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:55] – Introduction to RoboUmp in MLB
• [02:24] – Revisiting the infamous 1997 NLCS umpiring
• [05:56] – Human umpires' error rates and impact
• [07:04] – History of robotic umpire attempts
• [08:00] – How ABS technology works
• [10:15] – Minor League experiments with ABS
• [12:18] – Human-robot hybrid: Fred DeJesus’s experience
• [15:27] – Programming the "real" strike zone
• [19:41] – ABS reduces fan/umpire conflict
• [24:11] – 2026 update: MLB adopts challenge-based ABS
• [28:36] – The human impact: Umpires’ new public challenges
• [29:34] – The CB Buckner controversy
• [33:01] – Wrapping up: Wait and see for the rest of the season

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On Human Error:
  • Katie Nolan (03:27): “Egregious. Egregious.”
• On Changing the Strike Zone:
  • Zach Helfand (16:32): “That’s what they call the compassionate umpire effect.”
• On Fan Culture:
  • Narrator (17:34): “Yelling at the umpire is a part of the game.”
• On New Drama:
  • Chris Perube (27:49): “Instead, it is this moment of player versus umpire with the robot as the arbitrator. And that's actually kind of fun."
• On Unintended Consequences:
  • Chris Perube (32:17): “It has put this person under a microscope. It has empowered people to yell at this guy and be mean to him on social media and stuff.”

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The 99% Invisible Takeaway

"RoboUmp Hits the Big Leagues" thoughtfully balances the promise and pitfalls of automation in America's most tradition-bound game. The ABS system corrects human errors and adds new drama—but not without fresh challenges, especially for human umpires now more exposed than ever. As the 2026 season unfolds, baseball continues its uneasy negotiation between nostalgic imperfection and technological precision.

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Further Reading:

• Zach Helfand’s New Yorker article on robot umpires
• Katie Nolan’s new podcast, “Casuals”

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Transcript

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[Roman Mars]

and [e-mail] this is 99% invisible I'm Roman Mars and it's baseball season. If you haven't watched a game in a while, it can be a little confusing to jump back in. Major League Baseball has introduced a lot of rule changes in the last few years, including a countdown clock for pitchers to make the game go faster. They've also made it a rule that pitchers have to show their hands to the umpire between innings to make sure that the players aren't using any gooey substances to get an extra strong grip while the ball. But this season, the one rule change that everybody is talking about is the introduction of robot umpires. Starting in 2026, if a player doesn't like a ball or a strike call, they can appeal to a robot arbitrator called the ABS System who can overturn the call.

[Fred DeJesus]

And that one's going to be challenged. You know what? He gets it right reversed from a strike to a ball.

[Roman Mars]

And you may remember the name ABS system because we talked about it back in 2023. Today we're going to replay that episode and then I'll be joined by producer Chris Perube for an update on how the robot umpires are doing now that they've reached the major leagues. All right, play ball. If you're a baseball fan, you might remember the 1997 playoffs. That's when pitcher Lavon Hernandez was unstoppable.

[Chris Perube]

Can Levon Hernandez get out of it?

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Yes, he Hernandez was a rookie for the Florida Marlins, and his masterpiece was Game five of the National League Championship Series against Atlanta.

[Roman Mars]

That's producer, Chris Berube.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Levan Hernandez struck out 15 batters that game, which for context is so many batters.

[Chris Perube]

Strike three is 11.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

It was an incredible night, but a lot of his strikes, they weren't actually strikes. Hernandez was pretty consistently missing the zone.

[Zach Helfand]

The 3, 2 pitch got him.

[Chris Perube]

Eric Gregg crunches him out on what McGriff thought was ball four. It's his 15th.

[Katie Nolan]

This pitch is, I would say, a foot, two feet outside of the strike zone. Not close, called a strike.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

That's baseball analyst Katie Nolan. She vividly remembers that game because it really was not good.

[Katie Nolan]

I mean, okay, second pitch, way outside. Call the strike. Egregious. Egregious.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Katie and I rewatched video from that game with, let's call it a perverse fascination. Almost none of the batters actually swung at his pitches. You see Hernandez just winding up and throwing ball after ball like a fly foot outside the strike zone. And then, inexplicably, the umpire, Eric Gregg, he just kept making the hand signal for a strike.

[Katie Nolan]

It was so bad. It was probably the worst umpiring I can remember. The outside of this strike zone, it just didn't end. It was like a never ending strike zone.

[Roman Mars]

In case you don't know anything about baseball, in the major leagues, there are four umpires on the field, one behind each base and one behind plate. The home plate umpire has the most important job, which is calling balls and strikes. A strike is basically any hittable pitch. Something over the plate between the batter's chest and his knees, and a ball is everything else.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

I remember watching games as a kid, and whenever an umpire blew it, I would say I could do better than that. And so I tried. I was a little league and high

[Chris Perube]

school umpire from the age of 14

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

until my early 20s.

[Fred DeJesus]

And.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

And I think I could have gone

[Chris Perube]

pro if it weren't for my poor eyesight, my aversion to getting yelled at, and the time I was hit in the throat by a baseball.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

My point is, even in the little leagues, getting calls right is a lot harder than it looks. And at the pro level, the baseball is moving at like 95 miles an hour. It's kind of incredible that on average, umpires get it right about 94 to 97% of the time on strike calls. And umpires are getting better. The worst umpire today would have been upper tier in 1997. But the crazy high speed of the baseball means sometimes umpires are gonna get it wrong.

[Katie Nolan]

It just feels to me like it's asking a lot of the umpire to Be able to recognize if it nick d inside of the strike zone on its way over the plate or if it didn't. And I know we all make fun of the egregious calls, but I feel like some of them, you're not standing back there. You're not having to do it entirely with your eye. It's gotta be really difficult.

[Roman Mars]

One study from 2018 found that umpires blow about 14 calls every game. That's 34,000 bad calls every year. And it makes a difference. Like in the Lavon Hernandez game, the Florida Marlins came out on top, and a few weeks later, they won the World Series.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

These calls can make all the difference between a win and a loss, a championship. And sitting at home for six months just wondering what could have been if he'd only made the right call. Given the human fallibility of umpires, Major League Baseball has been considering something drastic, something that would take us up to 100% accuracy. They have a plan to replace human umpires with robots.

[Roman Mars]

Like any scenario where a human being is being replaced by a robot, there is the question of whether robots can do a better, more accurate job.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

And in baseball, a sport that is legendary for its quirks and its general human imperfection, there's another trickier is more accurate what we actually want?

[Roman Mars]

The idea of replacing an umpire with a machine isn't new. In the 1950s, the Brooklyn Dodgers tested a robot umpire designed by General Electric. The GE umpire was a big machine. It kind of looked like a barbecue hooked up to a specially tricked out home plate. If the ball cast a shadow over the plate, the machine would light up a big red button indicating a strike.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

The trouble is, the machine didn't work very well. It made a lot of bad calls. And if it was a night game, the robot umpire just didn't work at all.

[Roman Mars]

In the 1950s, the technology just wasn't ready, and the robot umpire went nowhere. For years, the idea seemed like a non starter. But a few years ago, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred, said he was considering robot umps for the big leagues.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

The robot umpires of the 21st century are a lot more sophisticated than a barbecue. But modern robot umpires, they aren't technically robots.

[Zach Helfand]

That's what a lot of people picture is, like, you know, beep, boop, boop, boop, kind of a, like, metallic thing behind home plate. What it really is, it's this system.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

That's Zach Helfand. He's an editor and sports writer at the New Yorker. And today's version of the robot Umpire is actually a series of HD cameras. But for some reason, the name integrated camera baseball tracking system has never caught on. So for this story, we're just going to keep calling them robots.

[Zach Helfand]

I prefer Robo. I just think Robo sounds better.

[Roman Mars]

Baseball won't be the first sport to use Robos to referee games. In tennis, there's a tracking system called Hawkeye that can pinpoint whether a ball is in or out of bounds.

[Zach Helfand]

And it was good.

[Chris Perube]

What a shot.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

And in soccer, they use motion tracking cameras to help determine offsides and whether the ball has crossed the goal line and the goal has been disallowed. In fact, most major league baseball stadiums already have a sophisticated ball tracking system in place. Those were installed in the early 2000s for TV broadcasts to give fans a clear picture of what happened during every pitch.

[Zach Helfand]

To track things like exit velocity off the bat, how fast the ball is moving off the bat, spin rate. It counts every single revolution of a baseball from when it leaves a pitcher's hand to when it gets to the plate. So they have these very sophisticated missile tracking systems, essentially in ballparks.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

By the way, he is not exaggerating. This is based on missile tracking technology.

[Roman Mars]

If you've watched a baseball game on tv, you've seen this tracking system in action. In replays, broadcasters will show you charts and scatter plots to lay out where the ball landed inside the strike zone. But the umpires, the people actually making the calls, don't have access to this information. Only viewers do, which creates some awkward moments for fans.

[Katie Nolan]

Wait, if we know that's a strike, why is he calling it a ball? It just doesn't make sense. Why doesn't he have the information I have? He should make the right call.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

But look, baseball is a pretty conservative sport. It's slow to embrace change. So for now, robot umpires are being tested on the minor leagues to work out some of the kinks and to help fans get used to the whole concept.

[Roman Mars]

Since 2019, robot UMP technology has been working its way through the minor leagues, where it's called ABS for automatic balls and strikes. Last year, the ABS made its way to the highest level of minor league baseball.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

I wanted to see this robot umpire, okay, ABS system in action. So I bought a ticket to watch some minor league baseball last summer in fabulous El Paso, Texas, where the hometown Chihuahuas were taking on the Albuquerque Isotopes. But I got Covid, so I had

[Chris Perube]

to watch the game at home.

[Game Announcer]

And the Isotopes in position. Riley Smith will start his last eight final warm up tosses before we get underway with tonight's game.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Coming into the game, I was worried the baseball experience would feel totally different without the umpires because for me, they're essential to the fabric of the game. But actually, I didn't miss the human umpires because they were still there.

[Chris Perube]

Fans, here are tonight's umpires.

[Zach Helfand]

Behind home plate is Dylan Wilson.

[Chris Perube]

Down the first baseline, Cody.

[Roman Mars]

For those of you worried about robots coming for human jobs, at least in this case the humans are safe. Baseball still needs humans for lots of important jobs like calling timeouts or cleaning home plate with those tiny, adorable brooms.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

This robot umpire was actually a collaboration between the ABS system that made the call and and the human umpire who said it out loud.

[Zach Helfand]

I listened with the earpiece along to a minor league game, and it's more or less instantaneous. The ball hits the glove, you kind of hear the smack of the ball in the glove, and a split second later you hear strike or ball. And it's funny. The strike is very peppy and, you know, sounds very encouraging. And the ball is ball. Kind of disappointed.

[Fred DeJesus]

It's a man's voice just saying, ball or strike.

[Chris Perube]

Ball.

[Fred DeJesus]

Strike.

[Zach Helfand]

Ball.

[Fred DeJesus]

Strike.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

That's Fred DeJesus. He was actually the first umpire to use the ABS system in 2019. Fun fact, his earpiece is now part of the collection at the Baseball hall of Fame.

[Fred DeJesus]

I obviously couldn't get there as a player, so I made my earpiece made. My joke is six Puerto Ricans have made it and one Puerto Rican's earpiece has made it.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Fred says at first he was Wary about the ABs, but he came around pretty quickly.

[Fred DeJesus]

You know, when in Rome, you do what the Romans want. They wanted you to follow the system you call it.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

I know this collaboration sounds, you know, a little ridiculous, but watching the game, I was pleasantly surprised. It was pretty smooth. It didn't look like a game umpired by a sophisticated missile robot. It just looked like a regular afternoon at the ballpark.

[Game Announcer]

And so here's Bernard. Right handed hitter against the lefty groom from the full wind up, first pitch.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

There are no publicly available statistics on the accuracy of the ABS system, but anecdotally, Fred DeJesus says it was pretty damn good.

[Fred DeJesus]

It was good. Very accurate. There were times where you would go, ooh, but again, you did what that machine wanted.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

There's no dispute here. The ABS is more accurate than a human umpire. Fred says there were some minor glitches when he used it, but nothing that can't be worked out. By the time the system reaches the major leagues. The accuracy thing is huge because there's just so much money on the line. A bad call at the wrong time can ruin a player's career. And sports betting is such a huge industry. Now I get why the major leagues want a more accurate system. But a few days after watching the robot umpire in action, my doubts started to creep back in because accuracy isn't everything. Here's Zach.

[Zach Helfand]

I don't think most people watch sports to see the fairest or most accurate outcome. For me, the argument comes down to efficiency and accuracy versus charm and drama and dialogue.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

The thing is, for more than 100 years, baseball has been played by humans and umpired by other humans. And in that process, we've introduced lots of small quirks and inefficiencies. For example, baseball stadiums don't have standard dimensions, so a home run at Fenway park might just be a long flyball at Dodger Stadium. Baseball just has all these unstandardized things.

[Roman Mars]

One of them is the application of the strike zone. Again, the textbook strike zone is supposed to be the player's chest to their knees over the plate.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

But most human umpires don't exactly follow those guidelines. There's lots of pitches that are considered hittable that don't land inside the textbook strike zone. And human umpires usually call those strikes. But the robot umpire, they've been slower to pick that up.

[Roman Mars]

In 2019, the ABS system was introduced to the Atlantic League, and it was programmed to call the textbook strike zone. But most fans and players thought the system felt off. The robot was calling a lot of hittable pitches as balls.

[Zach Helfand]

So when the strike zone is, you know, so coldly unchanging that sometimes presented some problems when. When the strike zone is smaller than what you're used to, games can can drag on.

[Roman Mars]

Zach Kelfin says the league needed to reprogram the ABs to be less accurate in how it called balls and strikes.

[Zach Helfand]

They expanded it to about maybe an inch or an inch and a half off of the plate counts as a strike, and that better represented what the real strike zone is.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

You can program the ABS to call a less accurate game, but you can't program it to do all these other things that human umpires just do instinctively. So I'm going to let you in

[Chris Perube]

on a little dirty baseball secret.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Umpires are constantly changing the strike zone based on context.

[Zach Helfand]

It's raining. Let's move this along. Let's get this over with. Or one team is up by a lot. Let's just go home. When a pitcher is struggling, there's a demonstrable effect that the umpire zone gets bigger. Sometimes it gets as much as 50% bigger. That's what they call the compassionate umpire effect. So a pitcher's having a really tough time. We're going to help them out, and they don't do this consciously.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

When you leave it up to the machines to decide balls and strikes, you're ignoring years of training and experience and intuition that every great umpire has. And you're taking away one of those small imperfections that makes baseball kind of romantic.

[Zach Helfand]

There is a trade off because you do lose this discussion. You do lose these quirks, these injustices, these twists of fate where someone blinks or gets dirt in their eye and they make a bad call. And that changes everything. I want to see how people react to that. We watch baseball to feel something, to divert ourselves. And sometimes it's nice to feel righteously mad against an umpire or. Or to feel like you got away with something.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Okay, but let's talk about righteous anger for a minute because Zack is totally right. Yelling at the umpire is a part of the game. Umpires get yelled at by fans and players and mascots pretty much non stop, because unlike other sports, baseball centers the umpire. The umpire is right behind the plate making judgment calls on every play. And usually the yelling is fun and cathartic and professional umpires can handle it,

[Chris Perube]

but it sucks to experience that.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Here's Katie Nolan.

[Katie Nolan]

Imagine going to work knowing you could get a shard of wood directly into your face, or you could get hit by a 100 mile per hour projectile in the face. On a bad day and on a good, the like ceiling of this job is like. You make calls that get people to tell you that you suck at your job and you're the worst and you ruined the game.

[Fred DeJesus]

You know, I've got a video on Instagram right now that's got over 3 million views where the player is saying, freddy, you're the worst umpire in the league. How did they mic you up? Now, he's obviously joking, but this is what the world wants to hear. They want umpires to be ridiculed.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

And it's not just ridicule. There are stories of umpires receiving death threats or even being physically assaulted by fans.

[Roman Mars]

Tonight, a Staten island parent coach is accused of punching the umpire so hard it left him with a broken jaw.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

CBS 2's Lisa Rosner spoke with friends

[Katie Nolan]

of the umpire in Somerset.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

People get carried away and it can get scary. I remembered this little league game where I made a really bad third strike call. And after the game A coach was waiting to yell at me in the park parking lot. The abuse is actually the primary reason that I stopped umpiring. And it's why my favorite thing about the robot umps isn't their accuracy, it's their ability to bring down the temperature. Zach Halfon noticed this, too, when he saw robot umpire in person. Fans were a lot less likely to get into arguments when they knew it was a machine making the calls.

[Zach Helfand]

Some fans who, as fans do, and as is part of the pleasure of baseball, were heckling the umpire when I was out there at one point, one of the fans who did know that they were using robo umpires this season in that league pointed up at the hardware above home plate and said, you know, it's not the umpire. This is just the strike zone. And the fan was humiliated in a certain way, very humbled, and was like, you know, what is actually calling a pretty good game?

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Watching the Isotopes Chihuahuas game. I remember this one at bat. So the Isotopes third baseman, Taylor Snyder was at the plate.

[Game Announcer]

Count still one and two bases juiced. Here's the pitch. Takes a called third strike. Breaking ball, inside corner. That ends the inning. Isotopes do not score. There was two hits, so the battery

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Snyder, he disagreed with the call. He thought it was inside, and he was clearly furious. He starts to turn towards the ump, and it looks like he is ready to yell. But then he didn't. He stopped himself and he walked back to the dugout. I'd never seen that before, and for me, that's a big plus for the idea of robot umps.

[Roman Mars]

Ultimately, the robot umpires are coming. They're going to be used in all AAA games this season. Some games will use a full robot umpire system, while others will use the robot umpire as an appeal system if the player doesn't like a call.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Robot umpires are probably going to show up in the major leagues in the

[Chris Perube]

next couple of years.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

And I know baseball purists are going to be really mad. I get that. I don't love the general idea of robots muscling in on human jobs, but I think I can live with this new technology because I'm in favor of anything that makes us see umpires as people, even if that thing is a robot.

[Roman Mars]

That story was first broadcast in 2023. Today, the robot umpire has officially been introduced at the major league level. And after the break, Chris Barube will tell us how it's going.

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[Roman Mars]

so we're back with Chris Perube. Hey Chris.

[Chris Perube]

Hey Roman.

[Roman Mars]

So Chris, what has changed since we first broadcast that story?

[Chris Perube]

So the robot umpire has arrived in Major League Baseball, but not in the way that I was predicting, certainly that a lot of people were predicting. So remember in that story we talked about a system where the robot umpire makes all the calls and then the human umpire says it out loud, right? Like they were trying that at the Triple A level. So Major League Baseball is not doing that. Instead, they are using the robot umpire as a kind of challenge system. So right now, human umpires are still making every ball and strike call.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

But if a player disagrees, they can challenge the call.

[Chris Perube]

And then the automated balls and strikes

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

will determine who was correct.

[Chris Perube]

So they're using the robot umpires, but humans are still doing most of the work.

[Roman Mars]

So this was not what I was expecting either. So how does that end up working during the game?

[Chris Perube]

So, Roman, I've actually sent you a link with an ABS challenge from a game this week between Atlanta and the Kansas City Royals. So I want you to pull it up and narrate through. Like, what is it that you see?

[Zach Helfand]

Okay.

[Roman Mars]

The pitch comes in. It looks a little low. Okay. The catcher taps his helmet. Okay. And then the umpire goes to the side to check what's happening. All right, all right. And then they show a graphic of

[Chris Perube]

the ball just sort of hitting the bottom of the strike zone. As you can see, this is very close call.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, I mean, the umpire did a really good job, actually.

[Chris Perube]

Yeah, that's a really close borderline call. So the fact. The fact the catcher knew to challenge that one is impressive. But yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's what it looks like. It's like the ball comes in and then either the catcher or the hitter or the pitcher taps their head, taps their helmet with their hat. And then the umpire says, okay, there's a challenge on the field. And then everybody looks up at the scoreboard and they show the graphic. Like, within about 10 seconds, you know what happened? And then it shows the graphic, and then the ABS decides, okay, that just graced the strike zone. So that's. That's a strike. Or, you know, that was actually outside. So that's a ball. So that's. That's how it works.

[Roman Mars]

Okay, so my question is this, okay, how much does this slow the game down? Like, baseball is not like a lightning fast game to begin with, you know, because I would imagine, like, why wouldn't you challenge everything, you know, like, and therefore slow everything down even more?

[Chris Perube]

This is a really good point, and I think this is what people were worried about with the introduction of the challenge system, but they've put in a rule to limit how often this happens. So each team only gets two challenges a game.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

But if you make a successful challenge, you get to keep it.

[Chris Perube]

So basically, each team gets the right to be wrong twice. So if you challenge and you're wrong, you lose that challenge for the rest of the game. So it incentivizes really only picking your spots. Like, really only doing it on important plays or plays where you're like, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this one?

[Roman Mars]

That's right. You have to save your challenges for when it really matters.

[Chris Perube]

That's it? Yeah.

[Roman Mars]

So are people happy with this so far?

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

I'd say for the most part, yes.

[Chris Perube]

So for players like, this has been pretty good because, you know, before, if there was a bad call, they had to kind of grin and bear it and go back to the dugout and be angry. But now a few times a game, you know, they can get a call overturned like they have some recourse. So that's cool for them. The fans, for the most part, they

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

seem pretty into it, which has been

[Chris Perube]

kind of a surprise. So this is anecdotal, like at the time of recording, we're one week into this experiment, but all the baseball fans in my life that I've spoken to have been like, huh, this is actually kind of fun. I'm surprised.

[Roman Mars]

What's fun about it?

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Well, I think what a lot of

[Chris Perube]

people were worried about was how this would affect the drama of the game, right? Because instead of having a human maker calls, you'd have, you know, a clinical robot making the calls. But it's actually creating more drama, which is because a couple times a game now a player will say, oh, you thought that was a strike?

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

I think that was a ball.

[Chris Perube]

And then everybody looks up at the scoreboard together.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

And then like, fans go crazy when

[Chris Perube]

their team is right, you know, in their challenges. So it's not what I was worried about, which was, oh, it's going to be human versus robot. That's kind of a boring conflict. Instead, it is this moment of player versus umpire with the robot as the arbitrator. And that's actually kind of fun. It's kind of fun to watch that happen.

[Roman Mars]

I mean, it actually does sound fun. So how are the umpires taking it?

[Chris Perube]

Well, that is a different story. So obviously no active major league umpires have said anything about it yet. I'm sure they're still in, you know, kind of a wait and see phase. And you know, you don't want to risk your job by saying something about Major League Baseball, but a couple of retired umpires have given interviews and basically what they've said is like, I feel terrible for the umpires right now because if you think about this from an umpire's perspective, this cannot be good for your self esteem, right? Or for your reputation. Because if you're an umpire several times a game now, someone questions your judgment and then everybody looks up at a

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

giant scoreboard to see if you blew it. And if you blew it, everyone cheers.

[Chris Perube]

Like, 30,000 people are cheering for a mistake that you made.

[Katie Nolan]

And.

[Chris Perube]

And for the accurate umpires, like, doesn't really matter that much. But for the ones who make mistakes more often, like, there's a couple of umpires who have been genuinely humiliated by the ABS system. And we're only a week into this so far.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, that doesn't sound fun at all.

[Chris Perube]

Yeah. So I want to show you an example of this. Roman, I want to turn your attention to the case of CB Buckner versus Eugenio Suarez. So, CB Buckner is an umpire. He's been in the league for about 26 years. And Eugenio Suarez is the third baseman for the Cincinnati Reds. And earlier this week, when we're recording this, they had a bit of a notorious dust up involving abs.

[Roman Mars]

Okay, let's watch it.

[Chris Perube]

So here we are. We are in Cincinnati, and this pitch is clearly low. Ao Genio Suarez taps his helmet to indicate he wants to challenge. Buckner looks out to the audience to say, the call's being challenged. Then we look up at the scoreboard, and it's pretty obvious that this one was, like, a little bit outside the zone. So Suarez was right. Call gets overturned. This was a third strike call, too. So this would have ended the inning, but instead he gets another pitch. And then it happens again a pitch later. So there's another pitch outside the zone. Suarez challenges again. Buckner's looking pretty upset. He talks to the audience. He's like, all right, I guess we're doing this again. And it's pretty obvious he was even more wrong this time. And now the crowd's losing it. They're like, yeah. Now, obviously, this is great drama, right? And for the fans, this is cool. Cause it's like, you get to challenge. And it's like, we were right. The umpire's wrong. Are you blind? You know all this stuff.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, yeah, sure.

[Chris Perube]

But for this umpire, you know, he had a whole stadium full of people cheering because he did a bad job at work, Right? And this clip went super viral. I did not know the name CB Buckner before this week. And now everybody in baseball knows who he is, Right. There've been all these articles that are like, here's another thing CB Buckner did, and this probably would not have happened without the ABS system challenging his goals.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, yeah, that sounds very rough for him. My heart goes out to cb.

[Chris Perube]

Yeah, it's about to get worse. So CB Buckner in that game got six calls overturned. So this is six times. And now, basically, anytime he does something wrong, there's people on Social media and people in the baseball media being like, cb Buckner screws up again. And on a contextual note, CB Buckner is one of the few black umpires in baseball. So this is obviously not ideal that this is the person coming in for so much criticism. I should note he is a below average umpire. Like, anybody who does the, like, tracking of umpire accuracy says, like, CB Buckner doesn't have a great eye. But, like, you gotta feel bad for this guy. And then later in the week, he got hit in the mask by a foul tip. Like, there was a foul ball that hit him in the face and he had to leave a game. So, you know, when it rains, it pours for this guy. Like, you gotta feel for this guy

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

on a human level.

[Roman Mars]

Absolutely. He's just having the worst week ever. My sympathies, for sure.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Yeah, me too.

[Chris Perube]

And when we did this original story, I came out softly on the side of robot umpires because I thought it would help people see umpires, like the humans as human beings. Right. Because it would take out some of this, like, vitriol against umpires in the game. But in this particular case, it's kind of doing the opposite. Like, it has put this person under a microscope. It has empowered people to yell at this guy and be mean to him on social media and stuff. And, you know, CB Buckner's a grown man. You know, comes with the territory. But, like, it has kind of done the opposite of what I was thinking the robot umpires would accomplish.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or a co-host)]

Yeah.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah. So I guess we'll just have to watch the rest of the season and see how it goes for all the other umpires. But I'm totally intrigued. Thanks for watching the Primer.

[Chris Perube]

Of course. And I hope we've given everybody some extra context when you're watching a baseball game this summer.

[Roman Mars]

Awesome. Well, thank you, Chris.

[Chris Perube]

Thanks, Roman.

[Roman Mars]

99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Barube. The 2023 episode was edited by Kelly prime and Fact Checked by Graham Hacha. Mix by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Riau. You can find Zach Halfon's article about robot umpires in the New Yorker. His latest feature story is about airport lounges. It is a must read for fans of 99pi. You're going to love it. Katie Nolan has recently launched a new sports podcast called Casuals. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. Our executive producer is Kathy Tu. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kolsted is the digital director. The Res team includes Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lema Dawn, Jacob Medina Gleason Talon and Rain Stradley, Joe Rosenberg and me, Roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family now, headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on Bluesky as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of [e-mail]

[Game Announcer]

foreign.

[Dr. Horton Advertiser]

Now is your time to get into a new Dr. Horton home by taking advantage of its national Red Tag sales event going on right now through Sunday, May 3rd. Stop by any of its participating communities and find select red tag homes at incredible Pricing. So whether you're buying your first home or looking for an upgrade, you don't want to miss the red Tag sales event going on right now. Discover the Dr. Horton difference. Visit Dr. Horton.com Dr. Horton America's Builder and Equal Housing Opportunity Builder Walmart Express

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