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.
What baseball’s “robot umpires” tell us about the future of work
Can MLB split the difference between humans and machines?
Bryan Walsh is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox’s Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk.
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 baseball’s first-ever Automated Ball-Strike (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.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
