The Truth About Baseball's Electronic Strike Zone
The 15th episode of The Plate Meeting, a LF Umpire Podcast from CloseCallSports.com explores the truth behind an electronic strike zone in baseball and the status of robot umpires: https://www.closecallsports.com/2019/....
This intro segment features a brief history of using technology to evaluate balls and strikes calls in MLB and a look back to Phil Jansenn, Grant E. Secrist, and a proposed pitch-calling umpire training simulator that professional baseball never developed, and the QuesTec umpire rating and ranking tool MLB opted to adopt instead.
We'll recap the decline of QuesTec the company and baseball's conversion to SMT SportVision's Pitch f/x technology and its eventual replacement, MLBAM StatCast, TrackMan, and the PitchCast application for broadcast.
With modern technology meant to supply immediate pitch data for broadcast (ESPN K-Zone, FOX Sports PitchTrax, etc.) at the expense of accuracy, we'll discuss the pitfalls and problems with a system that has MLB telling the umpires one thing behind closed doors (per the MLB Umpiring Department's Zone Evaluation, umpires are at least 97% accurate) while telling the public another thing (per MLB's Baseball Savant data, umpire accuracy is in the 91st percentile).