Robot umpires to make All-Star Game debut, another step toward possible regular-season use in 2026

Boston Globe

11 hours ago

'Pitchers think everything is a strike. Then you go back and look at it, and it's two, three balls off,' Pittsburgh's Paul Skenes, starting his second straight All-Star Game for the National League, said Monday. 'We should not be the ones that are challenging it.'
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MLB sets the top of the automated strike zone at 53.5 percent of a batter's height and the bottom at 27 percent, basing the decision on the midpoint of the plate, 8½ inches from the front and 8½ inches from the back. That contrasts with the rule book zone called by umpires, which says the zone is a cube.
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'I did a few rehabs starts with it. I'm OK with it. I think it works,' said three-time Cy Young Award winner Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers. '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.'
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Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred anticipates the system will be considered by the sport's 11-man competition committee, which includes six management representatives.
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Many pitchers have gravitated to letting their catchers and managers trigger ball/strike appeals. Teams won 52.2 percent of their challenges during the spring training test. Batters won exactly 50 percent of their 596 challenges and the defense 54 percent, with catchers successful 56 percent of the time and pitchers 41 percent.
Hall of Famer Joe Torre, an honorary AL coach, favors the system. After his managing career, he worked for MLB and helped supervised 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.'
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Now 84, Torre recalled how his Yankees teams benefitted 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 the Padres' 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.'
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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 over Orioles right fielder Tony Tarasco.