Major League Baseball plans to use its robot umpire technology for ball-strike challenges in Tuesday's All-Star Game at Atlanta, another step toward possible regular-season use next season. Versions of the system have existed for years without becoming a regular part of Major League Baseball games, per Engadget. But Commissioner Rob Manfred suggested last month that the competition committee was likely to soon take up whether to use it in regular season games, the AP reports.
The system will work as it did during its tryout in spring training, per ESPN:
- A human umpire will make the call as usual.
- Whichever team doesn't like it can appeal to the machinery.
- Each team will have two challenges, with the ability to retain them if they're successful.
- Only a pitcher, catcher or hitter can ask for a challenge, which has to be done almost immediately after the pitch.
Teams won 52.2% of their ball/strike challenges during the spring training test, with 617 of 1,182 challenges successful in the 288 exhibition games using the Automated Ball-Strike System. ABS was installed at 13 spring training ballparks hosting 19 teams, and an animation of the pitch was shown on video boards displaying the challenge result for spectators to see. Engadget reports the latest version of ABS uses Hawk-Eye, a computer vision system developed by Sony, to monitor the "exact location of the pitch relative to the batter's strike zone," in MLB's words.
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