AI on deck: assessing impact of MLB’s new ball-strike system

For 150 years, Major League Baseball (MLB) players and fans have accepted that an umpire missing a few balls and strikes is just part of the game. But this spring, MLB is rolling out an artificial intelligence-augmented camera system that will provide a second opinion for players to tap if they think an umpire whiffed.

This historic change inspired a Cornell research team to study how MLB stakeholders are integrating the Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS) - which tracks pitches in real time - into baseball's sacred gameplay.

"We hear so much about AI influencing political views and fueling polarization, and here's a case of AI being used as a consensus-building platform rather than creating division," said Waki Kamino, a doctoral student in the field of information science, who with colleagues has spent the last year attending spring training games and umpire trainings, and interviewing league executives, umpires and fans. "It's such a cool thing to see."

So far, Kamino and a team of human-robot interaction researchers from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science have published two papers, and submitted a third, exploring the tension that arises when technological precision is applied to the ambiguities of human decision-making.

Baseball's ABS consists of 12 AI-powered, Hawk-Eye cameras installed in each stadium and all focused on the strike zone - the roughly 17-inch-wide space between the batter's knees and chest. Trained and honed with umpires' feedback, the ABS will get called up to the big leagues this year after seven seasons in the minor leagues, where it was used and refined in thousands of games.

In each game, teams can challenge an umpire's ball or strike call, with only the pitcher, catcher or batter permitted to initiate those challenges. However, players must be judicious with challenges - if they lose two, the team is out of challenges for the rest of the game. Reviews will take about 15 seconds, and the Hawk-Eye pitch visualization will be shown on stadium video boards and to viewers at home.

Baseball's strike zone offered a fascinating test case, Kamino said: How can technology determine balls and strikes when MLB's very definition of the strike zoneis about as clear as a Paul Skenes fastball is hittable?