RoboUmp Hits the Big Leagues

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. And it’s baseball season! If you haven’t watched a game in a while, it can be a little confusing to jump back in. Major League Baseball has introduced a lot of rule changes in the last few years, including a countdown clock for pitchers to make the game go faster. They’ve also made it a rule that pitchers have to show their hands to the umpire between innings to make sure that the players aren’t using any gooey substances to get an extra strong grip on the ball. But this season, the one rule change that everybody is talking about is the introduction of robot umpires. Starting in 2026, if a player doesn’t like a ball or a strike call, they can appeal to a robot arbitrator called the ABS system who can overturn the call. 

COMMENTATOR #1: And that one’s gonna be challenged. You know what? He gets it right. Reverse from a strike to a ball…

ROMAN MARS: You may remember the name ABS system because we talked about it back in 2023. Today, we’re going to replay that episode, and then I’ll be joined by producer Chris Berube for an update on how the robot umpires are doing now that they’ve reached the major leagues. Alright. Play ball! 

If you’re a baseball fan, you might remember the 1997 playoffs. That’s when pitcher Liván Hernández was unstoppable. 

COMMENTATOR #2: Can Liván Hernández get out of it? Yes he can! 

CHRIS BERUBE: Hernández was a rookie for the Florida Marlins, and his masterpiece was Game Five of the National League Championship Series against Atlanta. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s producer Chris Berube. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Liván Hernández struck out 15 batters that game, which for context, is so many batters. 

COMMENTATOR #2: Strike three! His 11th! 

CHRIS BERUBE: It was an incredible night. But a lot of his strikes–they weren’t actually strikes. Hernández was pretty consistently missing the zone. 

COMMENTATOR #2: The 3-2 pitch. Got him! Eric Gregg punches him out on what McGriff thought was ball four. It’s his 15th…

KATIE NOLAN: This pitch is, I would say, a foot–two feet–outside of the strike zone. Not close. Called a strike. 

CHRIS BERUBE: That’s baseball analyst Katie Nolan. She vividly remembers that game because it really was not good. 

KATIE NOLAN: I mean, okay, second pitch, way outside, called a strike. Egregious. Egregous. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Katie and I rewatched video from that game with let’s call it a perverse fascination. Almost none of the batters actually swung at his pitches. You see Hernández just winding up and throwing ball after ball, like, a foot outside the strike zone. And then, inexplicably, the umpire Eric Gregg just kept making the hand signal for a strike. 

KATIE NOLAN: It was so bad. It was probably the worst umpiring I can remember. The outside of this strike zone–it just didn’t end. It was like a never-ending strike zone. 

ROMAN MARS: In case you don’t know anything about baseball, in the major leagues, there are four umpires on the field, one behind each base and one behind home plate. The home plate umpire has the most important job, which is calling balls and strikes. A strike is basically any hittable pitch, something over the plate, between the batter’s chest and his knees. And a ball is everything else. 

CHRIS BERUBE: I remember watching games as a kid, and whenever an umpire blew it, I would say, “I could do better than that.” And so I tried. I was a Little League and high school umpire from the age of 14 until my early 20s. And I think I could have gone pro if it weren’t for my poor eyesight, my aversion to getting yelled at, and the time I was hit in the throat by a baseball. My point is, even in the Little Leagues, getting calls right is a lot harder than it looks. And at the pro level, the baseball is moving at, like, 95 miles an hour. It’s kind of incredible that, on average, umpires get it right about 94% to 97% of the time on strike calls. And umpires are getting better. The worst umpire today would have been upper tier in 1997. But the crazy high speed of the baseball means sometimes umpires are going to get it wrong. 

KATIE NOLAN: It just feels to me like it’s asking a lot of the umpire to be able to recognize if it nicked the inside of the strike zone on its way over the plate or if it didn’t. And I know we all make fun of the egregious calls, but I feel like some of them… You’re not standing back there. You’re not having to do it entirely with your eye. It’s gotta be really difficult. 

ROMAN MARS: One study from 2018 found that umpires blow about 14 calls every game. That’s 34,000 bad calls every year. And it makes a difference, like in the Liván Hernández game. The Florida Marlins came out on top. And a few weeks later, they won the World Series. 

CHRIS BERUBE: These calls can make all the difference between a win and a loss–a championship and sitting at home for six months just wondering what could have been if he’d only made the right call. Given the human fallibility of umpires, Major League Baseball has been considering something drastic–something that would take us up to 100% accuracy. They have a plan to replace human umpires with robots. 

ROMAN MARS: Like any scenario where a human being is being replaced by a robot, there is the question of whether robots can do a better, more accurate job. 

CHRIS BERUBE: And in baseball–a sport that is legendary for its quirks and its general human imperfection–there’s another trickier question: Is more accurate what we actually want? 

ROMAN MARS: The idea of replacing an umpire with a machine isn’t new. In the 1950s, the Brooklyn Dodgers tested a robot umpire designed by General Electric. The GE umpire was a big machine that kind of looked like a barbecue, hooked up to a specially tricked out home plate. If the ball cast a shadow over the plate, the machine would light up a big red button, indicating a strike. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The trouble is the machine didn’t work very well. It made a lot of bad calls. And if it was a night game, the robot umpire just didn’t work at all. 

ROMAN MARS: In the 1950s, the technology just wasn’t ready. And the robot umpire went nowhere. For years, the idea seemed like a non-starter. But a few years ago, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred, said he was considering robot umps for the big leagues. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The robot umpires of the 21st century are a lot more sophisticated than a barbecue. But modern robot umpires–they aren’t technically robots. 

ZACH HELFAND: That’s what a lot of people picture. “Beep boop boop” kind of, like, metallic thing behind home plate. What it really is– It’s this system.

CHRIS BERUBE: That’s Zach Helfand. He’s an editor and sports writer at The New Yorker. And today’s version of the robot umpire is actually a series of HD cameras. But for some reason, the name Integrated Camera Baseball Tracking System has never caught on. So, for this story, we’re just gonna keep calling them robots. 

ZACH HELFAND: I prefer “robo.” Just think “robo” sounds better. 

ROMAN MARS: Baseball won’t be the first sport to use robos to referee games. In tennis, there’s a tracking system called Hawkeye that can pinpoint whether a ball is in or out of bounds. 

TENNIS COMMENTATOR: And it was good! What a shot…

CHRIS BERUBE: And in soccer, they use motion tracking cameras to help determine off sides and whether the ball has crossed the goal line. 

SOCCER COMMENTATOR: And the goal has been disallowed… 

CHRIS BERUBE: In fact, most major league baseball stadiums already have a sophisticated ball tracking system in place. Those were installed in the early 2000s for TV broadcasts, to give fans a clear picture of what happened during every pitch. 

ZACH HELFAND: To track things like exit velocity off the bat, how fast the ball is moving off the bat, and spin rate, it counts every single revolution of a baseball from when it leaves a pitcher’s hand to when it gets to the plate. So they have these very sophisticated missile tracking systems, essentially, in ballparks.

CHRIS BERUBE: By the way, he is not exaggerating. This is based on missile tracking technology. 

ROMAN MARS: If you’ve watched a baseball game on TV, you’ve seen this tracking system in action. In replays, broadcasters will show you charts and scatter plots to lay out where the ball landed inside the strike zone. But the umpires, the people actually making the calls, don’t have access to this information. Only viewers do, which creates some awkward moments for fans. 

KATIE NOLAN: Wait, if we know that’s a strike, why is he calling it a ball? It just doesn’t make sense. Why doesn’t he have the information I have? He should make the right call. 

CHRIS BERUBE: But look, baseball is a pretty conservative sport. It’s slow to embrace change. So, for now, robot umpires are being tested on the minor leagues to work out some of the kinks and to help fans get used to the whole concept. 

ROMAN MARS: Since 2019, robot ump technology has been working its way through the minor leagues, where it’s called ABS for Automatic Balls and Strikes. Last year, the ABS made its way to AAA, the highest level of minor league baseball. 

CHRIS BERUBE: I wanted to see this robot umpire–okay, ABS system–in action. So I bought a ticket to watch some minor league baseball last summer in fabulous El Paso, Texas, where the hometown Chihuahuas were taking on the Albuquerque Isotopes. But I got COVID, so I had to watch the game at home. 

COMMENTATOR #3: And the Isotope’s in position. Riley Smith will start his last eight final warm up tosses before we get underway with tonight’s game… 

CHRIS BERUBE: Coming into the game, I was worried the baseball experience would feel totally different without the umpires because, for me, they’re essential to the fabric of the game. But actually, I didn’t miss the human umpires because they were still there. 

COMMENTATOR #3: Fans, here are tonight’s umpires. Behind home plate is Dillon Wilson. Down the first base line, Cody Oakes…

ROMAN MARS: For those of you worried about robots coming for human jobs, at least in this case, the humans are safe. Baseball still needs humans for lots of important jobs, like calling timeouts or cleaning home plate with those tiny adorable brooms. 

CHRIS BERUBE: This robot umpire was actually a collaboration between the ABS system that made the call and the human umpire who said it out loud. 

ZACH HELFAND: I listened with the earpiece along to a minor league game, and it’s more or less instantaneous. The ball hits the glove, you kind of hear the smack of the ball in the glove, and a split second later you hear “strike” or “ball.” And it’s funny, the strike is very peppy and, you know, sounds very encouraging. And the ball is “ball,” kind of disappointed. 

FRED DEJESUS: It’s a man’s voice, just saying “ball” or “strike.” “Ball.” “Strike.” “Ball.” “Strike.”

CHRIS BERUBE: That’s Fred DeJesus. He was actually the first umpire to use the ABS system in 2019. Fun fact, his earpiece is now part of the collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

FRED DEJESUS: I obviously couldn’t get there as a player, so my earpiece made it. My joke is six Puerto Ricans have made it and one Puerto Rican’s earpiece has made it. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Fred says, at first, he was wary about the ABS. But he came around pretty quickly. 

FRED DEJESUS: You know, when in Rome, you do what the Romans want. They wanted you to follow the system, you call it.

CHRIS BERUBE: I know this collaboration sounds a little ridiculous, but watching the game, I was pleasantly surprised. It was pretty smooth. It didn’t look like a game umpired by a sophisticated missile robot. It just looked like a regular afternoon at the ballpark. 

COMMENTATOR #3: And so here’s Bernard. Right-handed hitter against the lefty Groome. From the full windup, first pitch…

CHRIS BERUBE: There are no publicly available statistics on the accuracy of the ABS system. But anecdotally, Fred DeJesus says it was pretty damn good. 

FRED DEJESUS: It was very accurate. There were times where you would go, “Ooh.” But again, you did what that machine wanted. 

CHRIS BERUBE: There’s no dispute here. The ABS is more accurate than a human umpire. Fred says there were some minor glitches when he used it but nothing that can’t be worked out by the time the system reaches the major leagues. The accuracy thing is huge because there’s just so much money on the line. A bad call at the wrong time can ruin a player’s career. And sports betting is such a huge industry now, I get why the major leagues want a more accurate system. But a few days after watching the robot umpire in action, my doubts started to creep back in because accuracy isn’t everything. Here’s Zach Helfand. 

ZACH HELFAND: I don’t think most people watch sports to see the fairest or most accurate outcome. For me, the argument comes down to efficiency and accuracy versus charm and drama and dialogue.

CHRIS BERUBE: The thing is, for more than a hundred years, baseball has been played by humans and umpired by other humans. And in that process, we’ve introduced lots of small quirks and inefficiencies. For example, baseball stadiums don’t have standard dimensions, so a home run at Fenway Park might just be a long fly ball at Dodger Stadium. Baseball just has all these un-standardized things. 

ROMAN MARS: One of them is the application of the strike zone. Again, the textbook strike zone is supposed to be the player’s chest to their knees over the plate. 

CHRIS BERUBE: But most human umpires don’t exactly follow those guidelines. There’s lots of pitches that are considered hitable that don’t land inside the textbook strike zone. And human umpires usually call those strikes. But the robot umpire–they’ve been slower to pick that up. 

ROMAN MARS: In 2019, the ABS system was introduced to the Atlantic League, and it was programmed to call the textbook strike zone. But most fans and players thought the system felt off. The robot was calling a lot of hittable pitches as balls. 

ZACH HELFAND: So, when the strike zone is so coldly unchanging, that sometimes presents some problems. When the strike zone is smaller than what you’re used to, games can drag on. 

ROMAN MARS: Zach Helfand says the league needed to reprogram the ABS to be less accurate in how it called balls and strikes. 

ZACH HELFAND: They expanded it to about maybe an inch or an inch and a half off of the plate counts as a strike. And that better represented what the real strike zone is.

CHRIS BERUBE: You can program the ABS to call a less accurate game, but you can’t program it to do all these other things that human umpires just do instinctively. So I’m going to let you in on a little dirty baseball secret. Umpires are constantly changing the strike zone based on context. 

ZACH HELFAND: “It’s raining. Let’s move this along. Let’s get this over with.” Or “One team is up by a lot. Let’s just go home.” When a pitcher is struggling, there’s a demonstrable effect that the umpire zone gets bigger. Sometimes it gets as much as 50% bigger. That’s what they call the compassionate umpire effect. So a pitcher’s having a really tough time. “We’re gonna help them out.” And they don’t do this consciously.

CHRIS BERUBE: When you leave it up to the machines to decide balls and strikes, you’re ignoring years of training and experience and intuition that every great umpire has. And you’re taking away one of those small imperfections that makes baseball kind of romantic. 

ZACH HELFAND: There is a trade off because you do lose this discussion. You do lose these quirks, these injustices, and these twists of fate where someone blinks or gets dirt in their eye and they make a bad call and that changes everything. I want to see how people react to that. We watch baseball to feel something–to divert ourselves. And sometimes it’s nice to feel righteously mad against an umpire or to feel like you got away with something. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Okay, but let’s talk about righteous anger for a minute because Zach is totally right. Yelling at the umpire is a part of the game. Umpires get yelled at by fans and players and mascots pretty much non-stop because, unlike other sports, baseball centers the umpires. The umpire is right behind the plate making judgment calls on every play. And usually the yelling is fun and cathartic and professional empires can handle it, but it sucks to experience that. Here’s Katie Nolan. 

KATIE NOLAN: Imagine going to work knowing you could get a shard of wood directly into your face or you could get hit by a 100 mile per hour projectile in the face on a bad day. And on a good– The ceiling of this job is, like, you make calls that get people to tell you that you suck at your job and you’re the worst and you ruined the game. 

FRED DEJESUS: You know, I’ve got a video on Instagram right now that’s got over three million views where the player is saying, “Freddy, you’re the worst umpire in the league. How did they mic you up?” Now he’s obviously joking, but this is what the world wants to hear. They want umpires to be ridiculed. 

CHRIS BERUBE: And it’s not just ridicule. There are stories of umpires receiving death threats or even being physically assaulted by fans. 

NEWSCASTER #1: Tonight a Staten Island parent coach is accused of punching an umpire so hard it left him with a broken jaw. 

NEWSCASTER #2: CBS 2’s Lisa Rozner spoke with friends of the umpire in…

CHRIS BERUBE: People get carried away, and it can get scary. I remember this Little League game where I made a really bad third strike call and, after the game, a coach was waiting to yell at me in the parking lot. The abuse is actually the primary reason that I stopped umpiring. And it’s why my favorite thing about the robot umps isn’t their accuracy. It’s their ability to bring down the temperature. Zach Helfand noticed this too when he saw a robot umpire in person. Fans were a lot less likely to get into arguments when they knew it was a machine making the calls. 

ZACH HELFAND: Some fans who–as fans do and as part of the pleasure of baseball–were heckling the umpire when I was out there. At one point, one of the fans who did know that they were using robo umpires this season in that league pointed up at the hardware above home plate and said, “You know, it’s not the umpire. This is just the strike zone.” And the fan was humiliated in a certain way–very humbled–and was like, “You know what? He’s actually calling a pretty good game.”

CHRIS BERUBE: Watching the Isotopes Chihuahuas game, I remember this one at bat. So, the isotope’s third baseman Taylor Snyder was at the plate. 

COMMENTATOR #3: Count still one and two. Bases juiced. Here’s the pitch. Takes a called third strike breaking ball inside corner. That ends the inning. Isotopes do not score…

CHRIS BERUBE: So the batter, Snyder, disagreed with the call. He thought it was inside. And he was clearly furious. He starts to turn towards the ump and it looks like he is ready to yell. But then he didn’t. He stopped himself. And he walked back to the dugout. I’d never seen that before. And for me, that’s a big plus for the idea of robot umps. 

ROMAN MARS: Ultimately, the robot umpires are coming. They’re going to be used in all AAA games this season. Some games will use a full robot umpire system, while others will use the robot umpire as an appeal system if the player doesn’t like a call. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Robot umpires are probably going to show up in the major leagues in the next couple of years. And I know baseball purists are going to be really mad. I get that. I don’t love the general idea of robots muscling in on human jobs. But I think I can live with this new technology because I’m in favor of anything that makes us see umpires as people, even if that thing is a robot. 

ROMAN MARS: That story was first broadcast in 2023. Today, the robot umpire has officially been introduced at the major league level. And after the break, Chris Berube will tell us how it’s going. 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So we’re back with Chris Berube. Hey Chris! 

CHRIS BERUBE: Hey Roman! 

ROMAN MARS: So, Chris, what has changed since we first broadcast that story? 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, the robot umpire has arrived in Major League Baseball, but not in the way that I was predicting–certainly that a lot of people were predicting. So remember, in that story, we talked about a system where the robot umpire makes all the calls and then the human umpires says it out loud, right? Like, they were trying that at the AAA level. So, Major League Baseball is not doing that. Instead they’re using the robot umpire as a kind of challenge system. So, right now, human umpires are still making every ball and strike call. But if a player disagrees, they can challenge the call. And then the automated balls and strikes will determine who was correct. So, they’re using the robot umpires, but humans are still doing most of the work. 

ROMAN MARS: So this was not what I was expecting either. So how does that end up working during the game? 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, Roman, I’ve actually sent you a link with an ABS challenge from a game this week between Atlanta and the Kansas City Royals. So, I want you to pull it up and narrate through. What is it that you see? 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, pitch comes in. It looks a little low. Okay, the catcher taps his helmet. Okay, and then the umpire goes to the side to check what’s happening. Alright. Alright. And then they show a graphic of the ball.

CHRIS BERUBE: Just sort of hitting the bottom of the strike zone. As you can see, this is a very close call. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, the umpire did a really good job, actually. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, that’s a really close borderline call. So the fact that the catcher knew to challenge that one is impressive. But yeah, so that’s what it looks like. It’s like the ball comes in and then either the catcher or the hitter or the pitcher taps their head–taps their helmet or their hat. And then the umpire says, “Okay. There’s a challenge on the field.” And then everybody looks up at the scoreboard, and they show the graphic. Like, within about ten seconds, you know what happened. And then it shows the graphic. And then the ABS decides, “Okay, that just graced the strike zone. So that’s a strike.” Or, you know, “That was actually outside, so that’s a ball.” So that’s how it works. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so my question is this. Okay, how much does this slow the game down? Like, baseball is not a lightning fast game to begin with, you know what I mean? I would imagine, like, why wouldn’t you challenge everything and therefore slow everything down even more?

CHRIS BERUBE: This is a really good point. And I think this is what people were worried about with the introduction of the challenge system, but they’ve put in a rule to limit how often this happens. So each team only gets two challenges a game. But if you make a successful challenge, you get to keep it. So basically each team gets the right to be wrong twice. So if you challenge and you’re wrong, you lose that challenge for the rest of the game. So it incentivizes really only picking your spots–really only doing it on important plays or plays where you’re like, “I’m pretty sure I’m right about this one.”

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. You have to save your challenges for when it really matters. 

CHRIS BERUBE: That’s it, yeah.

ROMAN MARS: So are people happy with this so far? 

CHRIS BERUBE: I’d say for the most part, yes. So, for players, this has been pretty good because, before, if there was a bad call, they had to kind of grin and bear it and go back to the dugout and be angry. But now, a few times a game, they can get a call overturned. They have some recourse, so that’s cool for them. The fans–for the most part–they seem pretty into it, which has been kind of a surprise. So, this is anecdotal. At the time of recording, we’re one week into this experiment. But all the baseball fans in my life that I’ve spoken to have been like, “Huh, this is actually kind of fun. I’m surprised.”

ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLES] Well, what’s fun about it? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, I think what a lot of people were worried about was how this would affect the drama of the game because, instead of having a human make calls, you’d have a clinical robot making the calls. But it’s actually creating more drama, which is because a couple of times a game now, a player will say, “Oh, you thought that was a strike? I think that was a ball.” And then everybody looks up at the scoreboard together. And then fans go crazy when their team is right in their challenges. So it’s not what I was worried about, which was it’s going to be human versus robot. That’s kind of a boring conflict. Instead, it is this moment of player versus umpire with the robot as the arbitrator. And that’s actually kind of fun. It’s kind of fun to watch that happen. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, it actually does sound fun. So how are the umpires taking it? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, that is a different story. So, obviously, no active major league umpires have said anything about it yet. I’m sure they’re still in kind of a wait and see phase. And you don’t want to risk your job by saying something about Major League Baseball. But a couple of retired umpires have given interviews. And basically what they’ve said is, like, “I feel terrible for the umpires right now.” If you think about this from an umpire’s perspective, this can not be good for your self-esteem or for your reputation because, if you’re an umpire, several times a game now, someone questions your judgment and then everybody looks up at a giant scoreboard to see if you blew it. And if you blew it, everyone cheers. 30,000 people are cheering for a mistake that you made. And for the accurate umpires, it doesn’t really matter that much. But for the ones who make mistakes more often–there’s a couple of umpires who have been genuinely humiliated by the ABS system and we’re only a week into this so far. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, that doesn’t sound fun at all. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah. So, I want to show you an example of this, Roman. I want to turn your attention to the case of C. B. Bucknor versus Eugenio Suárez. So, C. B. Bucknor is an umpire. He’s been in the league for about 26 years. And Eugenio Suárez is the third baseman for the Cincinnati Reds. And earlier this week, when we’re recording this, they had a bit of a notorious dust-up involving ABS. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, let’s watch it. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So here we are. We are in Cincinnati. And this pitch is clearly low. Eugenio Suárez taps his helmet to indicate he wants to challenge. Bucknor looks out to the audience to say the call is being challenged, then we look up at the scoreboard. And it’s pretty obvious that this one was, like, a little bit outside the zone. So Suárez was right, call gets overturned. This was a third strike call too, so this would have ended the inning, but instead he gets another pitch. And then it happens again a pitch later. So there’s another pitch outside the zone. Suárez challenges again. Bucknor’s looking pretty upset. He talks to the audience. He’s like, “All right, I guess we’re doing this again.” And it’s pretty obvious he was even more wrong this time. And now the crowd’s losing it. They’re like, “Yeah!” Now, obviously, this is great drama, right? And for the fans, this is cool because you get to challenge and it’s like, “We were right! The umpire is wrong! Are you blind?” But for this umpire, he had a whole stadium full of people cheering because he did a bad job at work. And this clip went super viral. I did not know the name “C. B. Bucknor” before this week. And now everybody in baseball knows who he is, right? There have been all these articles that are like, “Here’s another thing C. B. Bucknor did. And this probably would not have happened without the ABS system challenging his calls. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. That sounds very rough for him. My heart goes out to C. B. 

CHRIS BERUBE: It’s about to get worse. So C. B. Bucknor in that game got six calls overturned. So this happened six times. And now, basically, anytime he does something wrong, there’s people on social media and people in the baseball media being like, “C. B. Bucknor screws up again.” And a contextual note, C. B. Bucknor is one of the few Black umpires in baseball. So, this is obviously not ideal that this is the person coming in for so much criticism. I should note, he is a below average umpire. Like, anybody who does the tracking of umpire accuracy says that C. B. Bucknor doesn’t have a great eye. But you gotta feel bad for this guy. And then, later in the week, he got hit in the mask by a foul tip. There was a foul ball that hit him in the face and he had to leave the game. So, you know, when it rains it pours for this guy. You gotta for this guy on a human level. 

ROMAN MARS: Absolutely. He’s just having the worst week ever. My sympathies, for sure. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, me too. And when we did this original story, I came out softly on the side of robot umpires because I thought it would help people see umpires, the humans, as human beings because it would take out some of this vitriol against umpires in the game. But in this particular case, it’s kind of doing the opposite. It has put this person under a microscope. It has empowered people to yell at this guy and be mean to him on social media and stuff. And you know, C. B. Bucknor’s a grown man. It comes with the territory. But it has kind of done the opposite of what I was thinking the robot umpires would accomplish. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. So I guess we’ll just have to watch the rest of the season and see how it goes for all the other umpires. But I’m totally intrigued. Thanks for the primer.

CHRIS BERUBE: Of course. And I hope we’ve given everybody some extra context when you’re watching a baseball game this summer. 

ROMAN MARS: Awesome. Well, thank you, Chris. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Thanks, Roman. 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube. The 2023 episode was edited by Kelly Prime, and fact checked by Graham Hacia. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. 

You can find Zach Helfand’s article about robot umpires in The New Yorker. His latest feature story is about airport lounges. It is a must read for fans of 99PI. You’re gonna love it. Katie Nolan has recently launched a new sports podcast called Casuals. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. 

Our executive producer is Kathy Tu. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. 

The rest of the team includes Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars.

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. 

You can find us on Bluesky, as well as our own Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.