A small, but notable moment in baseball history occurred this week. In a US minor-league game between the San Rafael Pacifics and Vallejo Admirals, the home plate umpire did not call balls and strikes. Instead, a computerized video system was used to make the determinations, which were relayed by the game's announcer to the crowd cheering on the home team—and checking out the system's performance—at Albert Park in San Rafael, California.
The system, Pitchf/x from Chicago-based Sportvision, isn't new to baseball. It already provides data for evaluating players and umpires, and it helps TV viewers see where a pitch lands relative to the strike zone. But on July 28 it was used to make actual calls, marking the first time that's happened in professional baseball.
Maybe if Major League Baseball can save money on umpires they can lower ticket prices.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Saturday August 01 2015, @09:47AM
I would think the whole idea of having a computer call it is that supposedly the computer cannot be biased.
When I was a kid, I remember a radio-amateur friend of mine building a gadget that would call the game end when it got too dark. A little light sensitive photoelectric gizmo. It would wail when it got too dark.
It was made from a novelty car horn, a photoelectric tube, a relay, a couple of transformers and assorted parts.
It was something like this kind of stuff. [tubebooks.org]
They wanted his gadget because they wanted to make sure that no-one was trying to rig the game by calling an untimely end.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @11:26AM
http://m.mlb.com/news/article/2173765/ [mlb.com]
The balls, strikes and outs are recorded in Major League games by 70 umpires working in 17 crews of four (with two national rovers) working together in both leagues. Most came into the Majors after having worked from eight to 12 years on the average in the Minor Leagues for wages far below what they can earn in The Show.
A Major League umpire's starting salary is around $120,000, with the senior umps earning up to $350,000. That may sound like a lot for what seems to be six months' work, but the umpire's season is considerably longer than that with Spring Training, All-Star Games and postseason play added into the mix.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bziman on Saturday August 01 2015, @01:56PM
Baseball has the cheapest tickets in the United States for major professional sports. There are packages for a family of four including food for around $60. You can't take a family to a movie and get food for that. And you pay more than that for single tickets to an NBA or NFL game.
I don't care for baseball, but if you're going to add off-topic commentary to each story, at least try not to be factually out in left field. But better to keep your off-topic opinions to yourself, and put your snark, if you can't help yourself, in the department line.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 01 2015, @05:01PM
That's not editor commentary, it's submitter commentary.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by khedoros on Saturday August 01 2015, @10:13PM
(Score: 2, Disagree) by takyon on Saturday August 01 2015, @10:37PM
We use blockquotes for the quoted copyrighted text from news articles and other sources. Pretty easy to figure out from looking at a handful of stories.
Now you can learn and grow with this new knowledge - and flame at Phoenix666's commentary.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by khedoros on Sunday August 02 2015, @12:03AM
Now you can learn and grow with this new knowledge
You're making (or seem to be making) the unfounded assumptions that I didn't realize my error when reading it a second time, and that I actually have a wish to complain about what Phoenix wrote. I'm just saying that I understand where bziman is coming from; the notation is counter-intuitive to me.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bziman on Sunday August 02 2015, @05:29AM
Okay, so aside from my critique of the commentary, I really think that if you have "So and so writes:" followed by a blockquote, it is reasonable for me to assume that only the blockquote is attributable to so-and-so and that anything outside the blockquote is the editor. I think I've read that wrong since the very beginning. Is none of the non-blockquoted text the editor?? Oh crap. That is something I strongly urge you to change...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday August 01 2015, @05:05PM
I'm a submitter, not an editor. The editor does the department line.
Snark is the sacred right of the submitter, and always has been since the early days of /. The very name /. was snark. If you don't like snark, then you keep the submission queue full with submissions using a tone you like. I shall be snarky until the day I die, because that's how I'm wired.
And I can see professional live theater, dance, and concerts by world-class entertainers for free in New York. That you perceive $60 for a baseball game as inexpensive does not render factually incorrect that others perceive that as expensive. It's your opinion, as it is my opinion that that's a lot of money to sit around for four hours while getting soaked $5 for crappy hot dogs, $10 for crappy beer, all to see your team lose (if you're a Mets fan, or--shudder--a Cubs fan).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by gmrath on Saturday August 01 2015, @08:01PM
The Cubs seem to be winning more than they are losing these days. Not first in their division, but still. . . Then again, there's always the '69 season to think about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @08:57PM
And I can see professional live theater, dance, and concerts by world-class entertainers for free in New York.
You can see live minor league baseball for $10-$15 and get excellent seats quite close to the action, in towns all over America. In any sport, there's quite a difference in price between "professional, much better than 99 percent of all amateurs" and "major league professional". And the same is true even in music and the arts.
(Score: 2) by bziman on Saturday August 01 2015, @09:15PM
Okay, I apologize for the confusion, takyon and Phoenix666 - if you look at the story as posted, the line "Maybe if Major League Baseball can save money on umpires they can lower ticket prices." is outside of Phoenix666's blockquote, and I therefore assumed it was written by takyon, the editor.
I'm not saying baseball is cheap - it's just the cheapest of all the major American pro sports. I wouldn't pay any amount of money for a baseball game - I much prefer local musical theater (which is still really expensive, at least where I live).
But I stick to my guns that a non-sequitor about umpire pay (which contributes only the tiniest fraction to the cost of a baseball ticket) is totally off topic in a discussion about using technology to improve the accuracy of the game. Though I know hard-core baseball fans that would counter argue that the human aspect of the game is the most important part.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday August 01 2015, @10:18PM
The blockquote distinguishes an excerpt from the article. The line at the end is mine. It's not takyon's fault at all.
Umpire pay is certainly not a non-sequitor to a baseball game that is umpired entirely by a computer. How could it be? There is a meme that is arising in the media now about computers and robots replacing people permanently. It's been a constant article of discussion in the Soylent and Slashdot communities for years. So if we have a real world example of how a robot/computer could replace and has replaced an entire kind of work, then how could we not discuss both the tech involved and the repercussions of the tech?
Far from being totally off-topic, talking about the impact of replacing human umpires with computers could not be more totally on topic. If we as humans, as the "tool users" (technologists) sina qua non, do not consider the effects of those tools then we utterly fail the test of having them.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Saturday August 01 2015, @02:18PM
I just learned they are video challenging plays. I've never understood why they didn't. It's only 30 years too late. I'm glad they are bringing technology to, some say, America's past time. "Boring? Baseball wasn't... hmmm! So they finally jazzed it up?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @02:32PM
MLB records each at-bat on video and reviews the footage to evaluate the performance of plate umpires; they then provide feedback, not just to the particular ump, but to all umpires as part of continuous training. This has been going on for years, but it seems that a couple years ago they switched to vendors and now are able to determine with fairly decent precision whether a call was right or wrong. (If you think about it, this is a nontrivial problem, because big league pitches are commonly thrown between 85-98 MPH, and many change direction in the vicinity of the plate).
The upshot is that the strike zone as called today (and last year) is, in effect, lower and wider than it was just a few years ago. Also, the performance of plate umpires is considered much more uniform across the league - there's much less of a particular umpire calling certain pitches as strikes that most of his peer called as balls, and vice versa. This has lowered batting averages, and has devastated the careers of some older players who haven't been able to adjust.
So in effect we already have a certain amount of video officiating in place. As for saving money, the big money is made by the players - the *average* MLB player makes $4 million/yr, and there are 25 of them on each roster. Of course, minor leaguers struggling to get to "The Show", e.g. b/c their batting average is 30 points lower than what it needs to be, still live in poverty, just as in many entertainment businesses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @03:45PM
Unlike vampires!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @03:39PM
Umpires make so little compared to the players that eliminating them entirely won't affect ticket price at all. You're thinking just like Republicans, claiming the reason they want to eliminate funding to NASA and NIH and such is to "balance the budget", completely ignoring the area that costs more than every publicly-funded service and department put together - the military.