This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between. Welcome to all new readers/subscribers, and if you like what you’re reading, please join the mailing list and share, on social media or through e-mail or however you feel comfortable sharing. (It’s still FREE to join the list: Just click “None” on the “subscribe now” page.) The best way you can help out is by spreading the word and sharing with others. I have set up payment tiers, if you wish to chip in and allow me the time to do a little more research on on these posts and have full access to the archives—I’ve made those subscriptions about as cheap as Substack will let me make them, which is $5 a month or $40 a year.
Here is a brief video of a man making several egregious errors:
That is a Major League Baseball umpire named Eric Gregg, who is best known for two things: His weight-loss struggles, and his erratic balls-and-strikes calls in Game 5 of the 1997 National League Championship Series that may have been the most erratic performance by a home-plate umpire in the modern era of the sport.
Eric Gregg resigned his position in 1999 and died in 2006, but the legacy of this game lives on as baseball transitions from its Luddite roots and into a newly modernized and automated era. The Eric Gregg Game is perhaps the best argument for the notion that umpires should not be calling balls and strikes in baseball games in the first place; it is the strongest case for us to shove aside human umpires altogether and allow the robots to take over our lives.
II.
A lot of strange things are happening in San Francisco these days, though I suppose you could say weird things have been happening in San Francisco ever since the first copies of Howl landed at City Lights bookstore in 1957, or perhaps even since the chaotic throes of the gold-rush. But perhaps the strangest thing of all right now is that cars are driving themselves. Two companies, Cruise and Waymo, have been testing self-driving cars in the city for quite some time now, and they recently received approval from the state to operate 24 hours a day, which led to a lot of people doing what they do in San Francisco when something threatens to change the city: They freaked the fuck out.1
Of course, this change is actually a pretty huge deal. It’s one of those stories that seems like it should be an even bigger headline than it is, because it has the potential to revolutionize the way humans actually transport themselves in major cities and beyond. In this case, the classic San Francisco Freak-Out is at least partially justified, because it is clear that the technology that powers these cars is still imperfect and the corporations behind the corporations (in this case, General Motors and Google) are pushing to ramp things up as quickly as possible, even as their cars literally get mired in wet concrete. And that’s led to a classic Bay Area confrontation between two equally obnoxious forces: Countercultural Luddite goofballs and plundering tech start-ups.
But this is controversy is obviously not just about corporate greed. There’s something inherently creepy about seeing a car with no one in the driver’s seat; it challenges the whole social construct of America itself, which rather stupidly tethered the fundamental notion of personal freedom to the automobile and is now choking on the fumes of that choice. It’s about the rather daunting idea of ceding control to the robots, which is something we have been cautioned against for decades by German electronica bands and depressed Englishmen and dystopian 1980s sitcoms. And as artificial intelligence creeps into every aspect of our lives, these are the choices we will have to confront, both on our streets and behind home plate.
III.
“I don’t like the idea of the game becoming something where people are trying to outsmart a computer,” a Chicago Cubs outfielder named Mike Tauchman told the Associated Press last month. Tauchman played 24 games in Triple-A this season, where robot umpires are already in use. So far, the reviews are decidedly mixed, largely because, as the AP’s Ronald Blum wrote, there really isn’t any agreement on what a strike actually is.
This is a product of a century-and-a-half of humans calling balls and strikes: There is no easy way to define where the strike zone begins and ends. It varies from umpire to umpire, as it did with Eric Gregg on that day in 1997, when he appeared to disadvantage the Braves by calling just-a-bit-outside pitches for strikes against left-handed hitters, of which Atlanta had six at the top of its lineup. “The strike zone altered the game completely,” wrote the New York Times’ Buster Olney, “like raising a basket to 11 feet.”
And how did Gregg respond? “The strike zone has been the same for 100 years,” he said. “Next question.”
Ultimately, Gregg was correct. The strike zone may exist in the language of the rule book, but in real life, it’s never actually existed. It is an entirely human, completely subjective thing, and we are on the verge of ceding the control of that human thing to the robots.
In some areas of life, this is good: It’s laughable that people rage against self-driving cars for the mistakes they make when human drivers spew exhaust fumes and succumb to road rage and plow into each other on a regular basis every single day. And eventually, the hope from rational people is that self-driving cars will fix a fundamentally necessary pursuit that is both dumb and dangerous.
But what will an automated strike zone do? Will it wind up “fixing” something that we don’t actually want to be fixed? Will it strip an essential element of humanity from the sport, in the same way that film and television scripts written by robots would sap the humanity from entertainment? “There there are nuances of the game that I don’t think a computer can fully understand,” Mike Tauchman said, and that’s where we are now, both inside and outside of baseball—at a precarious moment in history, as we begin to define where the boundaries of the human experience start and end.
As someone who absolutely despises driving and the majority of drivers, I can tell you that there are two types of people in this world: People like me, and fascist sociopaths. I, for one, welcome our creepily autonomous overlords.
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The upside is that robot umpires would inevitably give Max Scherzer something to complain about, which I always look forward to.