DUNEDIN, Fla. — He’s a solver of problems. Always has been. It’s what makes great pitchers great. It’s what has made Max Scherzer great.
But when he visited Starkville this week to talk about robot umps and the fascinating spring training experiment with the ball-strike challenge system (plus lots more), the future Hall of Famer asked a pointed question for everyone in baseball to think about:
“What problem are we really solving?
“Think about the postseason last year,” Scherzer told me and Doug Glanville on the latest Starkville edition of The Athletic’s Windup podcast. “Are we really talking about (any controversies that) happened with the home plate umpires and strikes and balls? Is there anything that was really going on in that postseason? I don’t think so. So what problem are we really solving?”
That’s a question Scherzer would be asking even if he hadn’t gotten mixed up in a couple of amusing, challenge-related capers in his first two starts since joining his new team, the Toronto Blue Jays. He talked about both of those incidents on Starkville.
He even revealed that on the first-pitch challenge by his friend Trea Turner on Sunday, he was up to some hijinks of his own. (Listen to the podcast for more on that.)
But if it’s challenge-system feedback baseball wants this spring, then I think we found just the man to supply it. Scherzer has some thoughts. Always. He may be just two starts into this, but he’s already thinking about these robot umps (aka, the Automated Ball-Strike challenge system or ABS) more deeply than perhaps anyone else.
Here’s the gist of what’s spinning around his brain. Let’s start here:
1. He thinks almost all big-league umpires are “really good.”
2. He does not hate the challenge system.
But how do those two sentiments fit together?
“If you said, ‘Do we like the challenge system versus the status quo?’ Yes,” Scherzer said. “But do we like the challenge system versus maybe some other options here? That’s where I’m kind of skeptical.”
This is where we can almost catch you muttering, Uh-oh. But hear him out. He’s a fan of the technology. But …
“I just think there are two other ways to use the technology,” he said. “Look, the technology, the way we can measure this, it’s great. So how can we use it in a way that minimizes its impact in the game?”
Ready for his two big ideas? Here they come.
Max-ism No. 1: Use ABS to make umpires better, not override them — “We just want the game to stay the exact same,” Scherzer said. “So my first (idea) would be to say, hey, just grade the umpires. Look, most of the umpires are really good. And 99 percent of the time they’re getting the calls right. So (we should just be using ABS for) cutting down on the egregious calls overall as an industry.”
In other words, if, say, the problem is mostly confined to the bottom 5 percent of umpires in the sport, use ABS to grade the umpires, then keep the best ones and replace that bottom 5 percent. The umpires’ union might beg to differ. But they know where to find him.
“We want the best umpires in the game,” Scherzer said. “I don’t think that’s a problem of having humans be judged by humans. We just want to make sure that the best ones are there doing it.”
Max-ism No. 2: Give the robots their very own buffer zone — For a century, pitchers have learned to expand the strike zone, even by a fraction of an inch. Scherzer’s big idea: Reward them for doing it by allowing the robot umps to expand their zone (slightly).
“Introduce a buffer zone, maybe, around the challenge system,” he said. “So if you challenge and it’s in the buffer, the call stands. So you keep the human element still with the umpire. (And) you’re just trying to get rid of the egregious calls.”
I listened to him argue that pitchers should still get a strike called when they hit their spot (i.e., the precise spot where the catcher sets his glove). He made the case well. It didn’t mean I couldn’t object to it.
What, I asked, if the catcher was set up just outside the zone? What if the K-Zone rectangle proved that pitch was just outside? Why should that pitch be a strike? Shouldn’t pitches that are called strikes be actual strikes?
Naturally, Scherzer objected to my objection. He said he’s talking about pitches that are an eighth of an inch or a quarter-inch off the plate. To the human eye, those are so close to being strikes that it’s 50/50 whether a human umpire will call them a strike, according to Scherzer. So they don’t fit anyone’s definition of an “egregious” call that needs correcting.
If we’re going to use a challenge system to “correct” those pitches, he said, “we’re going to change our human behavior, because now we’ve changed how we call balls and strikes. So that’s kind of the things I think about, when you start taking away the human element of, ‘Hey, is it a quarter-inch here or there?’ So (to fix) some problems, are you going to be creating new problems to solve that quarter-inch conundrum that you’re talking about?”
The last thing baseball would want to do, obviously, is fix minor problems but manufacture bigger problems in the process. But that can of worms hasn’t opened yet. So let’s think all this stuff through before those worms start crawling.
Scherzer had many more insights into all of this, because he’s Max Scherzer. Listen to the whole podcast to hear him weigh in on:
• Why baseball should limit the number of challenges in a game, even if teams get them right.
• Why it’s a huge issue if the use of robot umps creates a strike zone very different from what players have known to be a strike all their lives.
• Whether a ninth-inning challenge in Game 7 of the World Series would be a good thing or a bad thing.
• Why the rise of sports betting makes this such an important issue.
• How an electronic strike zone could transform pitching from an art into just “a stuff game.”
• Why the strike zone now is a cloud, not a laser.
And lots, lots more — including some great talk about non-robot topics, like how to convince teams to stop hooking their starting pitchers after 70 pitches. You can find the entire conversation here.
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Robot umps are here: What MLB players need to know to navigate ABS this spring
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Trea Turner challenges first pitch of the day from Max Scherzer
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Max Scherzer opines on robot umps after first Jays start: ‘Can we just be judged by humans?’
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The Blue Jays ponder what might have been — the All-Almost-a-Blue-Jay Team — and what’s ahead
(Photo: Nathan Ray Seebeck / Imagn Images)
