Wed, June 4, 2003
Battlebots? Just The Beginning
(Brandon knows I love him.)
The Athletic Reporter's so-called "sports enthusiast" Joe Mulder wrote this week to herald the arrival of robotic systems that can enhance the accuracy of home plate umpires in major league baseball, with an eye toward eventually replacing them. He celebrates this imminent encroachment of technology because it will eliminate "individual" strike zones that umpires sometimes come up with and has the potential to reduce the number of inaccurate calls. Mulder, if that is his real name, dislikes these individual strike zones because he feels that if a game has a set of rules then everyone should play by them. But I've heard with my own ears when Mulder has repeatedly said, "The Braves aren't a good team because umpires give them calls; umpires give them calls because they have a superior pitching staff." Ha! Which is it, pal?
But leaving aside this gentle backward slide into hypocrisy (Mulder's been making up sports news on the site for so long, maybe he's started making up his own opinions), the argument for QuesTec's camera-based umpiring system is simply ludicrous. I'm watching the Braves play the Rangers right now and have been for about fifteen minutes. This means that we're coming up on my twenty-third minute of watching professional sports in the past two years; I think this qualifies me as at least as much of an expert as Mulder. And I think the QuesTec idea is terrible for baseball.
I made the mistake over the weekend of watching another of TLC's abysmally sensationalized documentary programs (Robosapiens). One thing that was mentioned on the program that we're all aware of anyway is that machines do not possess the human capacity for common sense. They make decisions based on information that has been programmed into them. Everything is black-and-white. Even in some future scenario where the camera placement and video resolution can be optimized to the point where these systems' "vision" is flawless, their decision making is inherently limited. Would Mulder have baseball enter a Dr. Strangelove world where the machines are making decisions and humans are removed from the equation? The lesson we learned from Jurassic Park (and, to a lesser extent, Jurassic Park) is that technology does not eliminate human error, it magnifies it. The mistakes of the programmers, designers, and administrators of such a system are magnified across all the decisions that system makes. The likelihood of flawless objective precision is far less than the chance of errors unforeseen by the system's designers.
Besides, isn't human error part of the game? As Kenny Mayne says (or maybe it was Dan Patrick), "That's why they play the games." (Indicating that, on paper, perhaps one outcome would seem more likely but in reality many more factors influence the actual result.) As kids, we had a computer version of Monopoly, which would roll the dice for you and keep track of your properties, etc. Also, you had the opportunity (for some reason) to type in the names and each player's default decision (buy properties or no) and it would run the entire game for you. Occasionally we'd play this way, and we could play about fifteen Monopoly games a minute. "Dad wins, I win, you win, you win, Dad wins, Dad wins, I win..." Sure it was more precise, but where was the fun? If you're going to install QuesTec to make the calls at home, why not install robots to hit the balls? Program in each batter's strengths and weaknesses and batting average, and let the computers take out the guesswork. For that matter, replace the pitchers and runners, too. We could play whole seasons in an afternoon! (With a little extra effort we could get computers to write wisecracks about the games' outcomes and Mulder could take some much-needed time off.)
As far as I'm concerned, people should play people-sports. If robots are involved, there should be a separate Robot League.
© onebee · all rights reserved
Brandon — Thu, 11/1/07 1:53pm
I don't remember this entry at all, so perhaps it was before my time here at onebee. What's the reference to me at the top?
And this simply cannot stand:
Human error on the part of the people actually playing the game, not the ones there to enforce the rules. The strike zone is a defined entity, it's right there in the rule book. The ideal would be to have an actual floating rectangle right there behind the plate, and the ball either goes through it (including clipping the side and bouncing through, like with a football goalpost) or it doesn't. So if computers, lasers or Steve Jobs can give us the virtual version of that, why would we not want that? That just seems crazy to me.
Bee Boy — Thu, 11/1/07 3:24pm
But the rest of this column you accept at face value as being totally rational? Okay...
Oh, so I guess you're the only Brandon I could possibly know or ever have known?! The nerve of some people!
As it happens, you are the only Brandon I know or ever have known. That line was pulled verbatim from an excellent Average Mulder column from a few months earlier. I admit it's not a reference that ages well. When I reread this four-year-old column last night (yes, apparently I reread every old column I link a new column to) it took me a second to remember why I included that part.
In Joe's column, he calls one of your opinions idiotic, then writes "(Brandon knows I love him)" to underline the fact that he's just making a point and doesn't mean anything personally. (Or possibly as some sort of gay code; you'd have to ask Joe.) So, when I attacked Joe's opinions – and Joe personally – for an entire column, I used the same phrase to make the same point. I could've said "Joe knows I love him" but then I risk Joe not getting the reference (and also, it looks gay).
Joe Mulder — Thu, 11/1/07 5:31pm
It's gay code.