Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer throws a pitching session during spring training in Dunedin Fla., on Feb. 17.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Max Scherzer’s first start as a Toronto Blue Jay this week was also his first go-round with the robot umpires.
Scherzer is 40 years old – right around the age where most people lose interest in learning new things at work. Your 40s are the “Can’t I just e-mail it to you and you put it in the system for me?” years.
In the second inning, Scherzer threw a looping curveball to St. Louis Cardinal JJ Wetherholt. The throw seemed low to me, looking at it on a laptop. It looked low to the umpire, who called it a ball. It must have looked low to the Jays’ catcher, who had to pull it off the dirt.
But it didn’t look low to Scherzer, who began furiously slapping the top of his head – the player signal that he would like the robot umpire to take a look.
The robot ump’s replay showed that it was low. So low that, had it been called a strike, someone would have written that the human umpire should have his eyes checked and be fired, and not in that order.
Afterward, Scherzer caught headlines for questioning the robot-ump experiment in toto (“Can’t we just be judged by humans?”).
Something else he said to reporters in Dunedin, Fla., about the Wetherholt call didn’t get as much notice: “Whether it was a ball or strike, in that moment I wanted to know, because each catcher has their own individual strike zone. … Get live feedback of knowing that’s actually below the zone based on his setup.”
Max Scherzer, 18-year big-league veteran and three-time Cy Young Award winner, does not know where the strike zone is. He’s asking a machine to tell him.
If Max Scherzer doesn’t know where the zone is, is there a zone at all? Or is there just an indeterminate area where strikes are sometimes called?
The point of robot umpires – which are just in the spring-training testing phase for now – isn’t getting it right. It’s manufacturing a little drama inside a sport that produces too little.
Baseball has taken a look over at tennis, seen the way crowds react to the Hawk-Eye replay (“Ooooooh-AAHHH!”) and decided it wants some of that. It’s a good idea. People love guessing games.
But what it risks is what every sport should fear – briefly exposing the lie of understanding.
Most ballplayers don’t know what’s going on a lot of the time. Like all the rest of us, they’re just guessing.
They understand their own jobs in the most narrow terms. But the pitcher doesn’t need to understand how the batter or outfielder does what he does, so he doesn’t.
This is how a top, top professional like Max Scherzer can go 20 years without figuring out where the strike zone ends. That wasn’t his job. It was the home-plate umpire’s.
Now someone has made it his job too, so he’s going to take a guess at it. As it turns out, he’s nowhere close.
In the olden days, no one thought of athletes as brilliant thinkers. They were physical savants. The best thing you could say of a great player was that he or she was a “natural” talent.
Over time, the idea of natural ability became an insult. Players didn’t want to hear that whatever they did came easy to them. It had to be hard. Up at 5 a.m. Constant study. First in the gym, last out. The whole myth of the Rocky montage.
This never made much sense. Have you ever known someone who was really good at something – I mean, really good – who found that thing difficult? There is no such thing as a Fields Medal winner who has trouble with multiplication (though that myth persists as well).
If you’re good at it, it’s easy. If it’s not easy, you’re not good at it. Nobody says that to kids, but it would make more people happy.
Sports is not full of especially hard workers. It’s full of genetic lottery winners who find sports easy.
But athletes don’t like that story. LeBron James isn’t an all-timer because he’s a 250-pound man who moves like Karen Kain. He’s an all-timer because he goes to the gym a lot. That’s the line. The latter keeps him at the top, but the former got him there in the first place.
The advent of the literary magazine profile prompted athletes to transform again – from hard workers to Renaissance men. Now they don’t just put in the time. They’re also deep thinkers.
This is largely done through the deployment of jargon.
It would be just as impressive if any one of us were to list all the small tasks we perform in our workday. I could tell you that I’m bringing my machine to the game to bang one out on the buzzer, and do a quote filler for final. Do you know what I mean? In part, I’m guessing, but not completely. So it sounds smart, though it isn’t.
It’s no more impressive when Tony Romo starts throwing around technical terms in the middle of a football game, but people talk about it like he’s the modern Leonardo. That’s how muddled we’ve become.
Like any technical advancement, the robot umps will expose the ignorance that underlies every workplace. Most people have no clue what’s happening most of the time. They’re just trying to sound smart. This is how an Enron happens or the current boondoggle in American government. Lots of smart-enough people, none of whom know anything, making terrible decisions.
But like every other place, baseball will adapt. The older generation will be left in the dust by a newer one that learns how to talk about robot umps. That way there won’t be any more “I’m actually not sure where the strike zone is” screw-ups.
In the end, will anyone be able to definitively locate the strike zone? No, of course not. It’s an unknowable thing.
What they will know is where the robot ump thinks the strike zone is, which isn’t the same. In this way, the ancient tradition of workplace ignorance – the thing that binds us all, regardless of what we do or how much we are paid to do it – can be maintained.