Minor-league baseball has been experimenting with an automated system to remove the need for umpires to call balls and strikes. Major League Baseball is considering such a move.Aaron Doster/The Associated Press
Professional sports leagues worldwide are working with tech providers to automate elements of their officiating, but the quest for improved accuracy does have drawbacks.
Tony Cho, director of officiating at Tennis Canada, started officiating for the sport in 1986, and it has taken him around the world. He’s seen firsthand how much technology has affected officiating in tennis as its audience continues to grow.
The sport first introduced line-judging technology at a Grand Slam event in 2006, at the U.S. Open. In 2021, most top-tier events started working with Electronic Line Calling Live – a system that eliminated the role of the human line umpire. Wimbledon and the French Open this year will utilize ELC Live for the first time.
“Back let’s say in the ‘80s when I started to what it is today, the increase in prize money, the level of exposure tennis gets … every match is seen by millions of people,” Cho says.
“So I think in some sense the stakes are much higher now. This is why the use of technology to make the right call, I think it’s crucial … going forward. This technology is there and if (it) is good enough, then if you can help to make a right call it is definitely positive.”
Major League Baseball has been monitoring the use of the Automated Ballstrike System (ABS) in the minors since 2019. It had hoped to bring it to the big leagues this past season, but in June, 2024, MLB announced the move would not happen before 2026.
While automation’s goal is to clarify previously contentious elements of baseball, such as the strike zone, it’s not necessarily that simple in practice.
Chris Marco, an 11-year umpire who worked in two Triple-A minor leagues, says he saw catchers who would sometimes try to make pitches look worse than they were – the opposite of what catchers usually do – to bait opposing teams into using one of their limited number of replay challenges.
“There was one catcher in particular that got really good at it,” says Marco, explaining that the player could make the batter think it was a poor pitch because of the way he received it. “He could then cause the other team to lose a challenge,” Marco adds.
He points out that as the ABS technology is updated for its eventual promotion to the majors, it is one of the hardest calls in sport to automate.
“The most controversial part of this (is) the discrepancies in the vertical aspects of the strike zone,” says Marco, whose contract was not renewed at the end of last season. “There’s going to be constant disagreement with what is judged to be the top and what is judged to be the bottom.
“(The automated) strike zone is a two-dimensional laser line, whereas baseball’s rulebook strike zone is a three-dimensional pentagon, or should be. Where they place that laser line is always going to be a subject of controversy.”
The placement of lines on a replay screen has been one of the sources of controversy since England’s Premier League introduced video review in 2019. The process is slow and its accuracy has often been questioned. In European soccer, Sweden has not introduced video review owing to the opposition of its clubs, while Norway’s top two tiers have voted to scrap the technology, a move currently opposed by the Norwegian Football Federation.
While the NBA only uses video technology to support human officials, it is exploring further automation for things like shot-clock violations and out-of-bounds calls.
The NBA uses “data and video as decision support tools in the replay centre, primarily focusing on goaltending calls as a proof of concept since the start of the 2023-24 season,” Albert Sanders, the league’s head of referee operations, said in a statement provided to The Globe and Mail.
“As the data and algorithms continue to improve, we plan to expand the scope of our automation capabilities.”
Tennis Canada’s Cho says he sees a future with further reductions in the responsibilities of human officials, but adds he believes there will always be a chair umpire.
“I think the reason that there’s always going to be a human element of officiating is because a lot of the calls are subjective, meaning somebody has to make a decision,” he explains.
“There’s always going to be that subjective thing where a player breaks a racquet or doesn’t break a racquet. But obviously (the role can be) tech-heavy in terms of the support and getting the accurate call.”