Robot Umpires Making All-Star Game Debut, Another Step Toward Regular-Season Use

Tarik Skubal views the strike zone differently than robot umpires.

“I have this thing where I think everything is a strike until the umpire calls it a ball,” Detroit’s AL Cy Young Award winner said ahead of his start for the American League in Tuesday night’s All-Star Game.

MLB has been experimenting with the automated ball-strike system in the minor leagues since 2019 and will use it in an All-Star Game for the first time this summer. Each team gets two challenges and retains the challenge if it is successful.

“Pitchers think everything is a strike,” Pittsburgh’s Paul Skenes, starting his second straight All-Star Game for the National League, said Monday. “Then you go back and look at it, and it’s two, three balls off. We should not be the ones that are challenging it.”

MLB sets the top of the automated strike zone at 53.5% of a batter’s height and the bottom at 27%, basing the decision on the midpoint of the plate, 8 1/2 inches from the front and 8 1/2 inches from the back. That contrasts with the rule book zone called by umpires, which says the zone is a cube.

“I did a few rehabs starts with it,” said three-time Cy Young Award winner Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers. “I’m OK with it. I think it works. Aaron Judge and Jose Altuve should have different-sized boxes. They’ve obviously thought about that. As long as that gets figured out, I think it’ll be fine.”

Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred anticipates the system will be considered by the sport’s 11-man competition committee, which includes six management representatives.

Many pitchers have gravitated to letting their catchers and managers trigger ball/strike appeals. Teams won 52.2% of their challenges during the spring training test. Batters won exactly 50% of their 596 challenges and the defense 54%, with catchers successful 56% of the time and pitchers 41%.

Hall of Famer Joe Torre, an honorary AL coach, favors the system. After his managing career, he worked for MLB and helped supervise expanded video review in 2014.

“You couldn’t ignore it with all the technology out there,” he said. “You couldn’t sit and make an excuse for, ‘Look at what really happened’ the next day.”

Now 84, Torre recalled how his Yankees teams benefited at least twice from blown calls in the postseason, including one involving the strike zone.

With the 1998 World Series opener tied and the bases loaded with two outs in the seventh inning, Tino Martinez took a 2-2 pitch from San Diego’s Mark Langston that appeared to be a strike but was called a ball by Richie Garcia. Martinez hit a grand slam on the next pitch for a 9-5 lead, and the Yankees went on to a four-game sweep.

Asked whether he was happy there was no robot umpire then, Torre grinned and said: “Possibly.”

Then he added without a prompt: “Well, not to mention the home run that Jeter hit.”

His reference was to Derek Jeter’s home run in the 1996 AL Championship Series opener, when 12-year-old fan Jeffrey Maier reached over the wall to snatch the ball above the glove of Baltimore right fielder Tony Tarasco.

Reporting by The Associated Press.

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