Opinion Piece from Practically News
Robot Refs Are Coming and Sports Will Never Be the Same; Nope, They’ll Be Better Than Ever!
What do basketball referees, football referees/umpires, and baseball umpires do when they can’t figure out what the right call is? Well, if they’re allowed to, they usually consult the various camera shots taken of the play in question. Sometimes a whole crew will study the video shots for five minutes or more. Why? Because they know that they are limited by their human abilities. “Pictures don’t lie,” the saying goes, but people lie or are mistaken all the time. Please note that the machines don’t ever ask humans for any help. “What do you umpires think?”the cameras asks the umpire team. No, I don’t think so, no more than a calculator would ask for your help in a math calculation. You know, of course, that computers have now own our greatest chess champions. No human can beat the best ones like Komodo. And they won’t beat Komodo’s next iteration either.
Think back to that obvious pass interference call in the Rams-Saints playoff game, one which your blind dog could have called better than the refs that day. You a Duke hater? (I’m guessing the answer is yes.) Did you see how UCF got robbed of a victory this past Sunday because of the missed calls at the end of that NCAA tournament game? Of course you did. Duke fans were thanking the basketball gods for their good fortune. UCF players? Not so much.
In baseball, a center field camera (or a camera with that same view) can show any TV viewer the proper strike zone for each player at bat and guess what — it’s obvious that the home plate umpire misses some of those ball/strike calls. Sometimes such calls can cost a team the game.
Do you even know how an umpire is supposed to determine what a strike is? And he/she has to determine it according to how a batter stands “for each pitch.” According to Wikipedia,
The Major League Official Rules defines the top of the strike zone at the midpoint between the top of the batter’s shoulders and the top of the uniform pants. The bottom of the strike zone is at the hollow beneath the kneecap, both determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at the pitched ball.
Excuse me! “At the midpoint” from the batters’ shoulders to the top of his/her pants? So to move the top of the strike zone higher, just move your pants higher up, right? And what if your shoulders don’t align perfectly horizontally? What the ump supposed to do? And what is this “hollow” below the kneecap? I’m not a physiologist, but I just don’t see one. Let’s face it; determining the exact strike zone for each pitch is a loser’s game
Tennis long ago ceded the superiority of cameras in determining which balls struck in-bounds or out-of-bounds. The sport has survived just fine.
There’s no doubt that national championships and world titles have been decided by blown referee calls. Yeah, commentators always say, “Ah, the game wasn’t decided on just that call.” True, but wouldn’t it be nice if all the calls were correct. And no, things don’t equal out over time. If your team is the one whose championship was snatched away by a stupid call, you will never get that championship back. Things won’t equal out over time.
This is why, starting with baseball’s home plate umpire, it is time for robots to replace human referees. Not all sports at once, mind you. Let’s start with baseball’s balls and strikes. And what do you know? There’s a baseball league — the Atlantic League — sporting teams such as the Camden River Sharks, the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs, and the Sugar Land Skeeters (an outlier for sure; Sugar Land is in Texas! and “skeeters” are mosquitoes) among others, and in the 2019 season they’re going to “make use of a radar tracking system to assist umpires in calling balls and strikes.”
Why “assist”? Why not hand the whole home plate job over to the bots?
Now some sports would be harder to computerize than others. The block/charge call in basketball is notoriously difficult to analyze. Experts will look at the exact same play from all different angles and still disagree as to what the correct call is. But certainly, thousands of videos of such calls (judged as “correct”) could be fed into a computer and the results ultimately would be superior to what we’re getting now. Also, there would be no emotional component whatever. And the calls would not change toward the end of the game when each call takes on world’s worth of value. No, computers would call them as they saw them, with no impact from crowd noise, player/coaches’ complaints, or the betting line.
I can remember when “instant replay” was introduced on Monday Night Football back in the early 70s. It revolutionized the game. I don’t remember anyone complaining about it. And it has led to where we are now, where machines will be far for accurate in judging athletic events than humans are.
Think how many horse races victories have been taken away from the true winners a hundred or more years ago when the final arbiter of victory was a couple dudes peering across the finish line. Think how many bettors must have been “swindled” out of their 50–1 shot winnings. Didn’t Michael Phelps win a gold medal by 1/100 of a second in the 2008 Olympic Butterfly final? Don’t worry; I’ve looked it up. He did. A human cannot judge the final touch of two swimmers, maybe lanes apart, through churning water.
Admit it! You can’t and shouldn’t hold back progress, especially when it would eliminate so many problems. Ad for the humans who lose their jobs, I feel for them, sure, but not the kind of feelings I feel for them when they f**k up. Also there would be a plethora of new jobs needed to help create and tune these new innovations.
Human Refs are Dead; Long Live the Robots and Cameras!
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Normally Practically News is a satiric feature created by Daniel Berenson that comes out three times a week. However, Daniel has ideas on occasion that are sincere, not satiric, so this is where you’ll find those as well. Thank you for reading and if you like this article or any or the satiric posts, please spread the word and/or send me those claps.
Thank you very much.
