The umpire is dead

What baseball's robot umpires tell us about the future of work.

View this email in your browser    👋  Did this email get forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Future Perfect in your inbox every Wednesday and Friday. Hey readers, Bryan here. For a sport that's more than 150 years old, the opening of the 2026 Major League Baseball season is set to feature an unusual number of firsts. The official Opening Day on March 26 is the earliest in baseball history. The first official game of the season tonight between the Giants and the Yankees — which is Opening Night, not Opening Day, totally different — will be the first-ever game streamed on Netflix.   And chances are that some time during that game, a player will tap his helmet or hat after a pitch is thrown, challenging the umpire's call and triggering MLB's first-ever Automated Balls and Strikes (ABS) system review. The robot umpires are here.   The system is remarkably straightforward. Each team gets two challenges per game, retaining them if successful, losing them if wrong. Only the pitcher, catcher, or batter can challenge, only over balls and strikes calls, and only within two seconds of the pitch.   Once a challenge is made, a network of 12 high-speed cameras installed around the stadium tracks the pitch's exact location, and then software creates a 3D model of the pitch's trajectory — on the Jumbotron for everyone to see — against the batter's individualized strike zone. The verdict is made instantly. The umpire doesn't go to a monitor and reconsider for minutes, like in NFL or NBA replay. He is merely the conduit to announce what the machine has decided.   This change should in theory make everyone better off. Teams have an appeal in the event of a potential blown call at a crucial moment (such as the brutal game-ending strike call for the Dominican Republic in this month's World Baseball Classic). Challenges are limited and rapidly decided, so the game doesn't slow down. The automated system is accurate to within 0.25 inches — roughly the width of a pencil — and quick enough to catch an Aroldis Chapman 103-mph fastball. Human umpires are still largely in charge of the game.   All in all, the ABS system appears to be an ideal compromise — preserving human judgement while allowing machines to correct the worst mistakes. While the system isn't AI-powered, it seems like an example of how humans and AI could fruitfully work together in the future, with humans firmly in the loop but aided by the machines.   Except there's a problem with splitting the difference between human and machine. Once you've conceded that the machine is the final authority on whether a call is right — which is exactly what baseball has done here — you've quietly eliminated the case for having the human there at all. What might seem like a stable equilibrium isn't stable at all.   Calling balls and strikes   You can see this breakdown already underway in the minor leagues, which has been experimenting with the ABS system for years. Baseball reporter Jayson Stark has written about umpires in the AAA minors who, having grown tired of being overturned for all to see by the machine, began to change the way they handled the game, "calling balls and strikes the way they think the robot would call them."   Because the league has given the machine final say, the human behind the mask doesn't stay independent — he starts mimicking the machine. The umpire — once the lord of the diamond, whose word was law — becomes in effect the rough draft for the AI. Human knowledge and expertise becomes degraded.   To which a baseball fan might respond, perhaps with more colorful language, "they're all bums anyway." Which wouldn't be quite fair to our carbon-based umpires, not that fairness to umps has ever been a concern for baseball fans. MLB estimates that umpires call 94 percent of pitches correctly, which on one hand is good — I'm not sure I'm 94 percent accurate on anything — but on the other hand, means they're still making mistakes on around 17 or 18 pitches a game on average.   And even though the data suggests umpires have actually been getting better, we're now able to see replays and precise pitch-tracking data that make it crystal clear just when a call has been blown. A guy named Ethan Singer even created an independent project called Umpire Scorecards, which uses publicly available Statcast/pitch tracking data to score every umpire, every game. The new ABS system just ratifies what previous technology made obvious years ago.   So the technological assault on the umpire's authority has been underway for some time, and while even the ABS system has its margin of error, the end result of introducing machines will be a more accurately called game. But real human skills will be lost along the way. The best catchers are experts at framing pitches to make them look like strikes, even if they aren't. Good batters learn an umpire's individual strike zone and adjust game to game. (The Red Sox great Ted Williams used to say there were three strike zones: his own, the pitcher's, and the umpire's.) All of these skills were built on human imperfection, and all of them will become less valuable even as machines make the game "fairer."   The one-way street of automation   To get a glimpse of baseball's possible future, just look at tennis.   In 2006, pro tennis introduced the Hawk-Eye challenges, which allowed players to appeal a limited number of line calls to an automated camera system. The players were, initially, not fans. (As Marat Safin put it: "Who was the genius who came up with this stupid idea?")   But the logic, especially as the sport got faster and faster, was undeniable. By 2020, the US Open had eliminated human line judging altogether, and Wimbledon followed suit in 2025. Human umpires are still employed, but mostly for the purposes of match management; i.e., shushing the crowd. The challenge system turned out to be just a stop on the path to near full-scale automation. And now baseball is stepping onto the same road.   The ABS system is what you get when an institution knows that the machine is better at the job but isn't ready to say so. That's exactly the position that a lot of organizations find themselves in right now, as AI grows ever more capable. The result, for the moment, tends to be a hybrid approach that leaves too many workers feeling stressed and disempowered, while failing to capture the benefits of more complete automation.   But over time, automation tends to prove to be a one-way street. The question isn't whether machines will eventually call balls and strikes. It's how much longer the halfway point can hold — for those umpires we love to hate, and for the rest of us. Bryan Walsh Senior editorial director Bryan Walsh Senior editorial director 📲 Send us your questions! If there is a topic you want us to explain or a story you're curious to learn more about, fill out this form or email us at futureperfect@vox.com. CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT... with Bryan Walsh   Title: Senior editorial director What I cover: Good News (usually) Other thing I'm thinking about: How quickly Phillies pitcher Zack Wheeler can recover from having a rib removed A viral tweet recently showed that ZeroGPT, one of the most popular AI detection tools on the internet, had flagged the Gettysburg Address as 96.2 percent likely to be written by AI. Which is either flat wrong or evidence that Abraham Lincoln had access to a time machine and a ChatGPT account. It's funny — until you realize that schools, universities, and employers are using flawed tools like this to make real decisions about real people. It turns out if you write clearly, concisely, and in a structured way — which is, you know, what good writing looks like — a machine may now decide you're a machine too. But what would it have looked like if the Gettysburg Address had actually been written by an AI, with all the worst AI writing traits? I gave that task to Claude and asked it to do its worst: Four score and seven years ago — or, to put it more precisely, approximately 87 years prior to the current moment — our forefathers made the bold yet nuanced decision to establish what can only be described as a truly transformative nation on this continent. It's important to note that this wasn't just about creating a country. It was about crafting a vision — a deeply resonant, forward-looking framework rooted in the proposition that all men are, in fact, created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war. This is, frankly, a multifaceted challenge. Let's break it down: ° The conflict tests whether our nation can endure ° It also tests whether any similarly conceived nation can endure ° Additionally, it raises important questions about long-term institutional resilience We have come to dedicate a portion of this field. And here's the thing — that's a completely valid and worthwhile endeavor. But in a very real sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have already done the heavy lifting on that front. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here. But here are three key takeaways from what they did here: 1. They gave their lives so that the nation might live 2. This represents, at its core, an incredibly powerful testament to human sacrifice 3. It is now our responsibility to leverage their legacy going forward Let me be clear: the task remaining before us is significant. But it is also deeply actionable. Because ultimately, this isn't about honoring the dead. It's about leveraging their sacrifice to create a more equitable and enduring union going forward. Meet us on Patreon! The Vox Membership program is getting even better with access to Vox's Patreon, where members can unlock exclusive videos, livestreams, and chats with our newsroom. Become a Vox Member to get access to it all. JOIN VOX ON PATREON   THE BIG STORY ➠ Oliver Sacks's not quite nonfiction He's known as one of the greatest science writers of our time. But some details in his intimate portraits of patients mirrored his personal life a little too closely. Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images Oliver Sacks — the neurologist behind groundbreaking books like Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat — is one of those rare science writers who became genuinely beloved. The "poet laureate of medicine," people called him. What set Sacks apart from too many other medical professionals is that he saw the human being behind the diagnosis when other doctors looked away.   But in the latest episode of Unexplainable, host Amy Pedulla talks with New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv, who spent months in Sacks's enormous personal archive of diaries, letters, and therapy notes, and found something unsettling. It turned out that Sacks wasn't just observing his patients' inner lives — he was projecting his own onto them. The same Rilke poem Sacks used in private letters to describe his own feeling of being caged turned up in a patient's mouth; a phrase from his love letters to a man in Berlin reappeared, almost verbatim, spoken by one of his catatonic patients. In his own journals, Sacks admitted what he was doing, writing about a "sense of criminality" over making things up. The easy takeaway is "Sacks lied." But Aviv's story is more interesting than that — it's about a closeted, deeply lonely man who kept writing his own longed-for awakening into other people's stories. Listen to the episode here. —Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director LISTEN TO THE STORY ⭐ ONE WAY TO DO GOOD THIS WEEK For five weeks now, some 50,000 TSA agents — who are among the lowest-paid federal workers in the country with a starting salary of $40,000 — have been working without pay. Ever since the partial government shutdown began on Valentine's Day, many of these agents have struggled to afford rent, buy groceries, and fill their gas tanks. Thankfully, some groups are stepping up to help — and no, I don't mean ICE. World Central Kitchen, the fast-acting hunger charity founded by celebrity chef José Andrés, has been delivering hot meals to airport workers affected by the shutdown. Local food banks have also been popping up at airports around the country, like City Harvest in New York City, Feeding South Florida in Miami, and Operation Food Search in St. Louis. Many airports also have their own employee food drives underway. Now's a great time to donate to help make sure your local airport workers — or anyone living paycheck to paycheck — have enough to eat. —Sara Herschander, Future Perfect fellow Want more Future Perfect in your inbox? Sign up for more newsletters here. Need advice? Submit a question to Sigal Samuel's advice column Your Mileage May Vary. Today's edition was edited by Katherine Courage and Seth Maxon and produced by Seth. We'll see you Friday!  Access the web version of this newsletter here.   This email was sent to cashub10.politicz@blogger.com. Manage your email preferences or unsubscribe. If you value Vox's unique explanatory journalism, support our work by becoming a Vox Member.   View our Privacy Notice and our Terms of Service.   Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2026. All rights reserved.