RoboUmp Hits the Big Leagues

The surprisingly long history of trying to use robots to call balls and strikes in baseball. With an update!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 0:44Roman Mars?

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• 1:26Roman Mars?

  That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel: that flutter in your heart when the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision-crafted performance. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. And it's baseball season. If you haven't watched a game in a while, it can be a little confusing to jump back in. Major League Baseball has introduced a lot of rule changes in the last few years, including a countdown clock for pitchers to make the game go faster. They've also made it a rule that pitchers have to show their hands to the umpire between innings to make sure that

• 2:10Roman Mars?

  The players aren't using any gooey substances to get an extra strong grip on the ball. But this season, the one rule change that everybody is talking about is the introduction of robot umpires. Starting in 2026, if a player doesn't like a ball or a strike call, they can appeal to a robot arbitrator called the ABS system, who can overturn the call.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  And that one's going to be challenged. And you know what? He gets it right. Reverse from a strike to a ball.

• 2:44Roman Mars?

  You may remember the name ABS system because we talked about it back in 2023. Today, we're going to replay that episode, and then I'll be joined by producer Chris Berube for an update on how the robot umpires are doing now that they've reached the major leagues. All right. Play ball. If you're a baseball fan, you might remember the 1997 playoffs. That's when pitcher Levon Hernandez was unstoppable.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Can Levon Hernandez get out of there? Yes, he can.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  Hernandez was a rookie for the Florida Marlins, and his masterpiece was game five of the National League Championship Series against Atlanta.

• 3:23Roman Mars?

  That's producer Chris Berube.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  Levon Hernandez struck out 15 batters that game, which, for context, is so many batters.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Strike three is 11.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  It was an incredible night, but a lot of his strikes, they weren't actually strikes. Hernandez was pretty consistently missing the zone.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  The 3-2 pitch. Got him! Eric Gray punches him out on what McGriff thought was ball four. It's his 15th.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  This pitch is, I would say, a foot, two feet outside of the strike zone. Not close, called a strike.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  That's baseball analyst Katie Nolan. She vividly remembers that game because it really was not good.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  I mean, OK, second pitch, way outside, called a strike.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Egregious, egregious.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Katie and I rewatched video from that game with, let's call it a perverse fascination. Almost none of the batters actually swung at his pitches. You see Hernandez just winding up and throwing ball after ball like a foot outside the strike zone. And then inexplicably, the umpire, Eric Gregg, he just kept making the hand signal for a strike.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  It was so bad. It was probably the worst umpiring I've, I can remember. The outside of this strike zone, it just didn't end. It was like a never ending strike zone.

• 5:02Roman Mars?

  In case you don't know anything about baseball, in the major leagues, there are four umpires on the field, one behind each base and one behind home plate. The home plate umpire has the most important job, which is calling balls and strikes. A strike is basically any hittable pitch, something over the plate, between the batter's chest and his knees, and a ball is everything else.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  I remember watching games as a kid, and whenever an umpire blew it, I would say, I could do better than that. And so I tried. I was a little league and high school umpire from the age of 14 until my early twenties. And I think I could have gone pro if it weren't for my poor eyesight, my aversion to getting yelled at, and the time I was hit in the throat by a baseball. My point is, even in the little leagues, getting calls right is a lot harder than it looks. And at the pro level, the baseball is moving at like 95 miles an hour. It's kind of incredible that on average, umpires get it right about 94 to 97% of the time on strike calls. And umpires are getting better.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  The worst umpire today would have been upper tier in 1997. But the crazy high speed of the baseball means sometimes umpires are gonna get it wrong.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  It just feels to me like it's asking a lot of the umpire to be able to recognize if it nicked the inside of the strike zone on its way over the plate, or if it didn't. And, and I know we all make fun of the egregious calls, but I feel like some of them, you're not standing back there, you're not having to do it entirely with your eye, it's gotta be really difficult.

• 6:42Roman Mars?

  One study from 2018 found that umpires blow about 14 calls every game. That's 34,000 bad calls every year. And it makes a difference, like in Levon Hernandez's game. The Florida Marlins came out on top, and a few weeks later, they won the World Series.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  These calls can make all the difference between a win and a loss, a championship, and sitting at home for six months, just wondering what could have been if he'd only made the right call. Given the human fallibility of umpires, Major League Baseball has been considering something drastic, something that would take us up to 100% accuracy. They have a plan to replace human umpires with robots.

• 7:28Roman Mars?

  Like any scenario where a human being is being replaced by a robot, there is the question of whether robots can do a better, more accurate job.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  And in baseball, a sport that is legendary for its quirks and its general human imperfection, there's another trickier question: is more accurate what we actually want?

• 7:50Roman Mars?

  The idea of replacing an umpire with a machine isn't new. In the 1950s, the Brooklyn Dodgers tested a robot umpire designed by General Electric. The GE Umpire was a big machine. It kind of looked like a barbecue, hooked up to a specially tricked-out home plate. If the ball cast a shadow over the plate, the machine would light up a big red button, indicating a strike.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  The trouble is, the machine didn't work very well. It made a lot of bad calls, and if it was a night game, the robot umpire just didn't work at all.

• 8:20Roman Mars?

  In the 1950s, the technology just wasn't ready, and the robot umpire went nowhere. For years, the idea seemed like a nonstarter. But a few years ago, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred, said he was considering robot umps for the big leagues.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  The robot umpires of the 21st century are a lot more sophisticated than a barbecue. But modern robot umpires, they aren't technically robots.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  That's what a lot of people picture is, is like, you know, beep boop boop boop, kind of a metallic thing behind home plate. What it really is, it's this system.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  That's Zach Helfand. He's an editor and sports writer at The New Yorker. And today's version of the robot umpire is actually a series of HD cameras. But for some reason, the name Integrated Camera Baseball Tracking System has never caught on. So for this story, we're just gonna keep calling them robots.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  I prefer robo. I just, I just think robo sounds better.

• 9:17Roman Mars?

  Baseball won't be the first sport to use robo's to referee games. In tennis, there's a tracking system called Hawkeye that can pinpoint whether a ball is in or out of bounds. And it was good. Whoa.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  What a shot. And in soccer, they use motion tracking cameras to help determine offside and whether the ball has crossed the goal line.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  And the goal has been disallowed.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  In fact, most major league baseball stadiums already have a sophisticated ball tracking system in place. Those were installed in the early 2000s for TV broadcasts to give fans a clear picture of what happened during every pitch.

• 9:56Speaker 05

  To track things like exit velocity off the bat, how fast the ball is moving off the bat, spin rate, it counts every single revolution of a baseball from when it leaves a pitcher's hand to when it gets to the plate. So they have these very sophisticated missile tracking systems essentially in ballparks.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  By the way, he is not exaggerating. This is based on missile tracking technology.

• 10:18Roman Mars?

  If you've watched a baseball game on TV, you've seen this tracking system in action. In replays, broadcasters will show you charts and scatter plots to lay out where the ball landed inside the strike zone. But the umpires, the people actually making the calls, don't have access to this information. Only viewers do, which creates some awkward moments for fans.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Wait, if we know that's a strike, why is he calling it a ball? It just doesn't make sense. Why doesn't he have the information I have? He should make the right call.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  But look, baseball is a pretty conservative sport. It's slow to embrace change. So for now, robot umpires are being tested on the minor leagues to work out some of the kinks and to help fans get used to the whole concept.

• 11:01Roman Mars?

  Since 2019, robot ump technology has been working its way through the minor leagues, where it's called ABS for Automatic Balls and Strikes. Last year, the ABS made its way to AAA, the highest level of minor league baseball.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  I wanted to see this robot umpire, okay, ABS system, in action. So I bought a ticket to watch some minor league baseball last summer in fabulous El Paso, Texas, where the hometown Chihuahuas were taking on the Albuquerque isotopes. But I got COVID, so I had to watch the game at home.

• 11:35Speaker 06

  And the isotopes in position. Riley Smith will start his last eight final warm-up tosses before we get underway with tonight's game.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Coming into the game, I was worried the baseball experience would feel totally different without the umpires. Because for me, they're essential to the fabric of the game. But actually, I didn't miss the human umpires, because they were still there.

• 12:00Speaker 06

  Fans here are tonight's umpires. Behind home plate is Dylan Wilson. Down the first baseline, Cody Oakes.

• 12:07Roman Mars?

  For those of you worried about robots coming for human jobs, at least in this case, the humans are safe. Baseball still needs humans for lots of important jobs, like calling timeouts or cleaning home plate with those tiny adorable brooms.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  This robot umpire was actually a collaboration between the ABS system that made the call and the human umpire who said it out loud.

• 12:32Speaker 05

  I listened with the earpiece along to a minor league game. And it's more or less instantaneous. Ball hits the glove, you kind of hear the smack of the ball and the glove. And a split second later, you hear "strike" or "ball." And it's funny, the strike is very peppy, and you know, it sounds very encouraging, and the ball is ball. Kind of disappointed.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  It's a man's voice just saying ball or strike. Ball, strike, ball, strike.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  That's Fred DeJesus. He was actually the first umpire to use the ABS system in 2019. Fun fact, his earpiece is now part of the collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame. I obviously couldn't get there as a player, so I made my earpiece made.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  My

• 13:22Speaker 07

  Joke is six Puerto Ricans have made it and one Puerto Rican's earpiece has made it.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Fred says at first he was wary about the ABS, but he came around pretty quickly.

• 13:34Speaker 07

  You know, when in Rome you do what the Romans want. They wanted you to follow the system, you call it.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  I know this collaboration sounds, you know, a little ridiculous, but watching the game, I was pleasantly surprised. It was pretty smooth. It didn't look like a game umpired by a sophisticated missile robot. It just looked like a regular afternoon at the ballpark.

• 13:56Speaker 06

  And so here's Bernard, right-handed hitter against the lefty groom from the full wind-up first pitch.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  There are no publicly available statistics on the accuracy of the ABS system, but anecdotally Fred de Jesus says it was pretty damn good.

• 14:11Speaker 07

  It was very accurate. There were times where you would go, ooh, but again, you did what that machine wanted.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  There's no dispute here. The ABS is more accurate than a human umpire. Fred says there were some minor glitches when he used it, but nothing that can't be worked out by the time the system reaches the major leagues. The accuracy thing is huge because there's just so much money on the line. A bad call at the wrong time can ruin a player's career. And sports betting is such a huge industry now. I get why the major leagues want a more accurate system. But a few days after watching the robot umpire in action, my doubts started to creep back in because accuracy isn't everything. Here's Zach Helfand.

• 15:01Speaker 05

  I don't think most people watch sports to see the fairest or most accurate outcome. For me, the argument comes down to efficiency and accuracy versus charm and drama and dialogue.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  The thing is, for more than 100 years, baseball has been played by humans and umpired by other humans. And in that process, we've introduced lots of small quirks and inefficiencies. For example, baseball stadiums don't have standard dimensions, so a homerun at Fenway Park might just be a long fly ball at Dodger Stadium. Baseball just has all these unstandardized things.

• 15:48Roman Mars?

  One of them is the application of the strike zone. Again, the textbook strike zone is supposed to be the player's chest to their knees over the plate.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  But most human umpires don't exactly follow those guidelines. There's lots of pitches that are considered hittable that don't land inside the textbook strike zone. And human umpires usually call those strikes. But the robot umpire, they've been slower to pick that up.

• 16:14Roman Mars?

  In 2019, the ABS system was introduced to the Atlantic League, and it was programmed to call the textbook strike zone. But most fans and players thought the system felt off. The robot was calling a lot of hittable pitches as balls.

• 16:29Speaker 05

  So when the strike zone is so coldly unchanging, that sometimes presented some problems. When the strike zone is smaller than what you're used to, games can drag on.

• 16:42Roman Mars?

  Zach Kelfin says the league needed to reprogram the ABS to be less accurate in how it called balls and strikes.

• 16:49Speaker 05

  They expanded it to about maybe an inch or an inch and a half off of the plate counts as a strike, and that better represented what the real strike zone is.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  You can program the ABS to call a less accurate game, but you can't program it to do all these other things that human umpires just do instinctively. So I'm going to let you in on a little dirty baseball secret. Umpires are constantly changing the strike zone based on context.

• 17:19Speaker 05

  It's raining, let's move this along, let's get this over with. Or one team is up by a lot, let's just go home. When a pitcher is struggling, there's a demonstrable effect that the umpire zone gets bigger. Sometimes it gets as much as 50% bigger. That's what they call the compassionate umpire effect. So a pitcher's having a really tough time, we're going to help him out. And they don't do this consciously.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  When you leave it up to the machines to decide balls and strikes, you're ignoring years of training and experience and intuition that every great umpire has. And you're taking away one of those small imperfections that makes baseball kind of romantic.

• 17:55Speaker 05

  There is a trade off because you do lose this discussion. You do lose these quirks, these injustices, these twists of fate where someone blinks or gets dirt in their eye and they make a bad call and that changes everything. I want to see how people react to that. We watch baseball to feel something, to divert ourselves. And sometimes it's nice to feel righteously mad against an umpire or to feel like you got away with something.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Okay, but let's talk about righteous anger for a minute. Because Zach is totally right. Yelling at the umpire is a part of the game. Umpires get yelled at by fans and players and mascots pretty much nonstop. Because unlike other sports, baseball centers the umpire. The umpire is right behind the plate, making judgment calls on every play. And usually the yelling is fun and cathartic and professional umpires can handle it. But it sucks to experience that. Here's Katie Nolan.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  Imagine going to work knowing you could get a shard of wood directly into your face or you could get hit by a 100 mile per hour projectile in the face on a bad day and on a good, like, ceiling of this job is like you make calls that get people to tell you that you suck at your job and you're the worst and you ruined the game.

• 19:15Speaker 07

  You know, I've got a video on Instagram right now that's got over 3 million views where the player is saying, Freddie, you're the worst umpire in the league. How did they mic you up? Now, he's obviously joking, but this is what the world wants to hear. They want umpires to be ridiculed.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  And it's not just ridicule. There are stories of umpires receiving death threats, or even being physically assaulted by fans.

• 19:43Roman Mars?

  Tonight, a Staten Island parent coach is accused of punching the umpire so hard it left him with a broken jaw.

• 19:48Speaker 07

  CBS 2's Lisa Rosner spoke with Friends of the Umpire in Somerset.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  People get carried away, and it can get scary. I remembered this Little League game, where I made a really bad third strike call, and after the game, a coach was waiting to yell at me in the parking lot. The abuse is actually the primary reason that I stopped umpiring. And it's why my favorite thing about the robot Umps isn't their accuracy, it's their ability to bring down the temperature. Zach Helfin noticed this too when he saw a robot umpire in person. Fans were a lot less likely to get into arguments when they knew it was a machine making the calls.

• 20:27Speaker 05

  Some fans, who, as fans do, and as is part of the pleasure of baseball, were heckling the umpire when I was out there. At one point, one of the fans who did know that they were using robot umpires this season in that league, pointed up at the hardware above home plate and said, you know, it's not the umpire, this is just the strike zone. And the fan was humiliated in a certain way, very humbled, and was like, you know what, he's actually calling a pretty good game.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Watching the Isotopes-Chihuahuas game, I remember this one at bat. So, the Isotopes' third baseman, Taylor Snyder, was at the plate.

• 21:08Speaker 06

  Count still one and two. Bases juiced. Here's the pitch. Takes a called third strike breaking ball inside corner. That ends the inning. Isotopes do not score. There was two hits, no error.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  So the batter, Snyder, he disagreed with the call. He thought it was inside, and he was clearly furious. He starts to turn towards the ump, and it looks like he is ready to yell. But then, he didn't. He stopped himself, and he walked back to the dugout. I'd never seen that before. And for me, that's a big plus for the idea of robot Umps.

• 21:47Roman Mars?

  Robot umpires are coming. They're going to be used in all AAA games this season. Some games will use a full robot umpire system, while others will use the robot umpire as an appeal system if the player doesn't like a call.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Robot umpires are probably going to show up in the major leagues in the next couple of years. And I know baseball purists are going to be really mad. I get that. I don't love the general idea of robots muscling in on human jobs. But I think I can live with this new technology. Because I'm in favor of anything that makes us see umpires as people. Even if that thing is a robot.

• 22:35Roman Mars?

  That story was first broadcast in 2023. Today, the robot umpire has officially been introduced at the major league level. And after the break, Chris Berube will tell us how it's going.

• 22:56Roman Mars?

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• 23:37Roman Mars?

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• 25:52Roman Mars?

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• 26:06Roman Mars?

  So we're back with Chris Boruba. Hey, Chris.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Hey, Roman.

• 26:09Roman Mars?

  So Chris, what has changed since we first broadcast that story?

• 26:13Speaker 03

  So the robot umpire has arrived in Major League Baseball, but not in the way that I was predicting, certainly that a lot of people were predicting. So remember in that story, we talked about a system where the robot umpire makes all the calls and then the human umpire says it out loud, right? Like they were trying that at the AAA level. So Major League Baseball is not doing that. Instead, they are using the robot umpire as a kind of challenge system. So right now, human umpires are still making every ball and strike call. But if a player disagrees, they can challenge the call and then the automated balls and strikes will determine who was correct. So they're using the robot umpires, but humans are still doing most of the work.

• 26:54Roman Mars?

  So this was not what I was expecting either. So how does that end up working during the game?

• 26:59Speaker 03

  So Roman, I've actually sent you a link with an ABS challenge from a game this week between Atlanta and the Kansas City Royals. So I want you to pull it up and narrate through, like, what is it that you see?

• 27:10Roman Mars?

  Okay, pitch comes in. It looks a little low. Okay, the catcher taps his helmet. Okay, and then the umpire goes to the side to check what's happening. All right. All right. And then they show a graphic of the ball.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Just sort of hitting the bottom of the strike zone. As you can see, this is very close call. Yeah.

• 27:32Roman Mars?

  I mean, the umpire did a really good job, actually.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  That's a really close borderline call. So the fact the catcher knew to challenge that one is impressive. But yeah, so that's what it looks like. It's like the ball comes in and then either the catcher or the hitter or the pitcher taps their head, taps their helmet with their hat. And then the umpire says, okay, there's a challenge on the field. And then everybody looks up at the scoreboard and they show the graphic. Like within about 10 seconds, you know what happened. And then it shows the graphic and then the ABS decides, okay, that just graced the strike zone. So that's a strike or, you know, that was actually outside. So that's a ball. So that's how it works.

• 28:08Roman Mars?

  Okay, so my question is this, okay? How much does this slow the game down? Like, baseball is not like a lightning fast game to begin with. You know what I mean?

• 28:18Roman Mars?

  Because I would imagine, like, why wouldn't you challenge everything? You know, like, and therefore slow everything down even more?

• 28:25Speaker 03

  This is a really good point, and I think this is what people were worried about with the introduction of the challenge system. But they've put in a rule to limit how often this happens. So each team only gets two challenges a game. But if you make a successful challenge, you get to keep it. So basically, each team gets the right to be wrong twice. So if you, you know, if you challenge and you're wrong, you lose that challenge for the rest of the game. So it incentivizes really only picking your spots, like really only doing it on important plays or plays where you're like, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this one.

• 28:59Roman Mars?

  That's right. You have to save your challenges for when it really matters.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  That's it. Yeah.

• 29:03Roman Mars?

  So are people happy with this so far?

• 29:06Speaker 03

  I'd say for the most part, yes. So for players, like, this has been pretty good because, you know, before, if there was a bad call, they had to kind of grin and bear it and go back to the dugout and be angry. But now, a few times a game, you know, they can get a call overturned, like they have some recourse. So that's cool for them. The fans, for the most part, they seem pretty into it, which has been kind of a surprise. So this is anecdotal, like, at the time of recording, we're one week into this experiment. But all the baseball fans in my life that I've spoken to have been like, huh, this is actually kind of fun. I'm surprised.

• 29:42Roman Mars?

  What's fun about it?

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Well, I think what a lot of people were worried about was how this would affect the drama of the game, right? Because instead of having a human make calls, you'd have, you know, a clinical robot making the calls. But it's actually creating more drama, which is because a couple of times a game now, a player will say, oh, you thought that was a strike? I think that was a ball. And then everybody looks up at the scoreboard together. And then, like, fans go crazy when their team is right, you know? And their challenges. So it's not what I was worried about, which was, oh, it's going to be human versus robot. That's kind of a boring conflict. Instead, it is this moment of player versus umpire with the robot as the arbitrator. And that's actually kind of fun. It's kind of fun to watch that happen.

• 30:28Roman Mars?

  I mean, I think it does sound fun. So how are the umpires taking it?

• 30:32Speaker 03

  Well, that is a different story. So obviously, no active Major League umpires have said anything about it yet. I'm sure they're still in, you know, kind of a wait and see phase and, you know, you don't want to risk your job by saying something about Major League Baseball. But a couple of retired umpires have given interviews and basically what they've said is like, I feel terrible for the umpires right now. Because if you think about this from an umpire's perspective, this cannot be good for your self-esteem, right? Or for your reputation, because if you're an umpire several times a game now, someone questions your judgment. And then everybody looks up at a giant scoreboard to see if you blew it. And if you blew it, everyone cheers, like 30,000 people are cheering for a mistake that you made.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  And for the accurate umpires, like, doesn't really matter that much, but for the ones who make mistakes more often, like, there's a couple of umpires who have been genuinely humiliated by the ABS system and we're only a week into this so far.

• 31:29Roman Mars?

  Yeah, that doesn't sound fun at all.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I want to show you an example of this, Roman. I want to turn your attention to the case of C.B. Buckner versus Eugenio Suarez. So C.B. Buckner is an umpire. He's been in the league for about 26 years and Eugenio Suarez is the third baseman for the Cincinnati Reds. And earlier this week, when we're recording this, they had a bit of a notorious dust-up involving ABS.

• 31:53Roman Mars?

  Okay, let's watch it.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  So here we are. We are in Cincinnati and this pitch is clearly low. Eugenio Suarez taps his helmet to indicate he wants to challenge. Buckner looks out to the audience to say the call is being challenged. Then we look up at the scoreboard. And it's pretty obvious that this one was like a little bit outside the zone. So Suarez was right. Call gets overturned. This was a third strike call too, so this would have ended the inning, but instead he gets another pitch. And then it happens again a pitch later. So there's another pitch outside the zone. Suarez challenges again. Buckner's looking pretty upset. He talks to the audience. He's like, all right, I guess we're doing this again. And it's pretty obvious he was even more wrong this time. And now the crowd's losing it. They're like, yeah. Now, obviously, this is great drama, right?

• 32:40Speaker 03

  And for the fans, this is cool because it's like you get to challenge. And it's like, we were right, the umpire is wrong. Are you blind? You know, all this stuff.

• 32:48Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  But for this umpire, you know, he had a whole stadium full of people cheering because he did a bad job at work. Right?

• 32:55Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  And this clip went super viral. I did not know the name CB Buckner before this week. And now everybody in baseball knows who he is, right? There have been all these articles that are like, here's another thing CB Buckner did. And this probably would not have happened without the ABS system challenging his calls.

• 33:14Roman Mars?

  Yeah, that sounds very rough for him. My, my, my heart goes out to CB.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  It's about to get worse. So CB Buckner, in that game, got six calls overturned. So this happened to him six times. And now, basically, anytime he does something wrong, there's people on social media and people in the baseball media being like, CB Buckner screws up again. And a contextual note, CB Buckner is one of the few black umpires in baseball. So this is obviously not ideal that this is the person coming in for so much criticism. I should note, he is a below average umpire. Like, anybody who does the, like, tracking of umpire accuracy says, like, CB Buckner doesn't have a great eye, but like, you gotta feel bad for this guy. And then, later in the week, he got hit in the mask by a foul tip. Like, there was a foul ball that hit him in the face and he had to leave a game.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  So, you know, when it rains, it pours for this guy. Like, you gotta feel for this guy on a human level.

• 34:07Roman Mars?

  Absolutely. He's just having the worst week ever. My, my sympathies, for sure.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, me too. And when we did this original story, I came out softly on the side of robot umpires because I thought it would help people see umpires, like the humans, as human beings, right? Because it would take out some of this, like, vitriol against umpires in the game. But in this particular case, it's kind of doing the opposite. Like, it has put this person under a microscope. It has empowered people to, you know, yell at this guy and be mean to him on social media and stuff. And, you know, CB Buckner's a grown man, you know, comes with the territory. But like, it has kind of done the opposite of what I was thinking the robot umpires would accomplish.

• 34:48Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. So I guess we'll just have to watch the rest of the season and see how it goes for all the other umpires. But I'm totally intrigued. Thanks for the primer.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Of course, and I hope we've given everybody some extra context when you're watching a baseball game this summer.

• 35:01Roman Mars?

  Awesome. Well, thank you, Chris.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Thanks, Roman.

• 35:09Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube. The 2023 episode was edited by Kelly Prime and fact-checked by Graham Hesha. Mixed by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. You can find Zach Halfen's article about robot umpires in The New Yorker. His latest feature story is about airport lounges. It is a must-read for fans of 99PI. You're gonna love it. Katie Nolan has recently launched a new sports podcast called Casuals. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. Our executive producer is Kathy Too. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Laish Madan, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradly, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars.

• 35:53Roman Mars?

  The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on Blue Sky as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 36:31Speaker 07

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