Whether you like instant replay or not, you have to admit that baseball did pretty well without it for almost 200 years.
Horsehide fiend: The machines will kill us all
A look at replay as the affable catalyst for a baseball dystopia.
The current system for reviewing close plays will almost certainly change several times over the next few years as the old game eases into its new brackets with the “Is this really working?” reluctant KA-CHUNK of a VHS tape into a VCR. A large subset of the baseball world has been hesitant to adopt this new wrinkle with open arms. The argument is often based around the idea that baseball was just fine the way it was, and that the addition of replay and manager challenges could lead to a game with just as many problems -- the just-barely aborted revolt over the transfer rule, for example -- but with more rules and stoppages thrown into the mix. But now we’re traveling into dangerous territory, where unintended consequences may loom large. Remember Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics?
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot may not injure its own kind and defend its own kind unless it is interfering with the first or second rule.
Yeah. Those are fiction. Paraphrasing the science-fiction writer Fred Saberhagen, a robot may have the shape of a man, but the mind of an electronic devil. Give the suckers an inch and pretty soon they’ll be ubiquitous. Heck, they are ubiquitous.
What if the game continues to adopt new technology in the spirit of, “Getting things right?” Since when is that one of our priorities? This is the land of the brave, the home of the free, and the nation of “Heckuva job, Brownie! [glub]” Precision has never been our strong suit, and trying to change that now could cause irreparable harm to American psyche. Remember, this is the one industrialized nation in the world that can’t handle the metric system. Conversely, as a recent article in the Atlantic put it, “robots are utility function junkies.”
Even the smallest input that indicates that they’re performing their primary function better, faster, and at greater scale is enough to prompt them to keep doing more of that regardless of virtually every other consideration. That’s fine when you are talking about a simple program like Excel but becomes a problem when AI entities capable of rudimentary logic take over weapons, utilities or other dangerous or valuable assets.
In such situations, better performance will bring more resources and power to fulfill that primary function more fully, faster, and at greater scale. More importantly, these systems don’t worry about costs in terms of relationships, discomfort to others, etc., unless those costs present clear barriers to more primary function. This sort of computer behavior is anti-social, not fully logical, but not entirely illogical either.
In other words, it could all get away from us. No doubt you saw Reds manager Bryan Price ejected for arguing a replay call that went against him. Not long from now, when the machines take over, the penalty could be far worse than ejection. After all, delaying a game to argue an issue that’s already been decided is a literal inefficiency, and machines can’t tolerate that.
Recently, I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who is pro-replay. He cited the argument that getting the call right matters much more than the NFL-esque side-effects of delay and anticlimax replay could present.
I asked him, “So, you’d be in favor of an automated strike zone, too?”
“Yes!” he replied emphatically.
This is where the pro-replay argument begins to lose me. Do we really want robot umps? Baseball tried it once. It did not go well. The late umpire Ron Luciano described a 1970 experiment with what he called “the machine” in his first book, The Umpire Strikes Back:
It was a short, stubby thing that made strange sounds. Kind of reminded me of Earl Weaver. Two laser beams created a screen over home plate and could be adjusted to the strike zone of each batter. If a pitched ball went through the beam, a red light flashed on.
The machine had the soul of a pitcher. During the first test it called every pitch a strike. [Catcher] Thurman Munson was catching and couldn’t stop laughing. “Jeez, Luciano,” he yelled at me, “this machine is even blinder than you.” [After several additional problems and attempted fixes] they turned it on. Even before the batter stepped in, Munson accidentally stuck his glove in the laser beam. Red lights! As soon as Thurman realized he could trip the machine so easily, he began sticking his glove into the beam on every pitch.
[More fixes later:] “It’s fine now,” the inventers said nervously. Batters could tap their bats on home plate and catchers could stick their gloves in the beam. There was just one word of caution. “Don’t the the ball,” they pleaded. “It’ll break.”
Forty-four years on, it’s safe to assume Baseball can do better than that, but if technology continues to become more and more integrated into the game, will it still be the same game or will it give way to a Ship of Theseus sort of conundrum in which we can’t be sure if we’re looking at the same game we had been for the previous 175 years?
Of course, we haven’t been; like The Last Supper, “restored” so many times that not a jot of paint by Davinci remains in it, baseball is not the same game it was 10 years ago, let alone 100. If umpires and managers can use replay, why not let the players use it? Why not let them wear specified Google glasses that can tell them what pitch to throw and where, detect the spin on a ball headed for the batters box, or recommend the best route to a fly ball? At least one team already owns a supercomputer and FieldFX is about to change the way defense is evaluated, why not let ‘em wear a pair of little glasses?
If you think that extrapolating technology is ridiculous, think about what a cell phone looked like 10 years ago, or 20. They were like steamer trunks with antennae. Imagine what developers will be able to do with Google Glass and its successors over the next decade.
Maybe the compression sleeves many players wear now will evolve as well. The United States Army and several private tech companies -- like Lockheed Martin and Sarcos -- have spent millions on the development of powered exoskeletons. Seriously. This might sound like something out of a video game -- because it is -- but it is also very real. This microelectromechanical suit might be used to aid field medics in performing more precise surgery and could also allow troops to carry previously impossible amounts of weight on and off the battlefield. Iron Man times 100, basically. Pop one of those on Yasiel Puig and watch him flip his bat to Sacramento after homering into the Salton Sea.
These developers are also working on something called wearable robotics, that could increase the strength, mobility, and endurance of soldiers. Or baseball players. Maybe those examples are a little bit of a stretch, but if you’re going to make changes to a game that was already pretty damn good, why not just make it an entirely different game? Spaceball or something?
Look, I’d love to watch Robocop try to obliterate a pitch launched out of a hovering Panzershreck, but that’s not really baseball anymore, is it?
And of course, there’s the issue of malicious artificial intelligence to consider. If a robot ump is programmed to value its primary goal of correctly maintaining a perfect strike zone, and human umpires are still out there calling questionable balls and strikes, the programming that spurs the robot ump might very well adapt to the situation. Any deviation from a geometrically perfect strike zone would propel the program to correct such an issue. If a robot ump’s programming primary goal was being repeatedly compromised by human umpires, the robots could create a subgoal of ending those deviations to better enforce their purpose -- perhaps permanently.
You can probably see where this is headed.
So don’t support replay in baseball ... unless you want to start an artificially intelligent uprising.
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