Foolproof Umpire,
The
By HUGO LINDGREN
A baseball umpire's
job behind the plate has long been considered
more a matter of art than a science, which is
one reason managers lose their tempers so
often. According to the official rules, the
strike zone is defined by the width of the
plate, from the batter's knees to his chest.
But in reality, no two umpires ever call it
the same way -- some shave the corners, others
expand them and almost nobody respects the
upper reaches of the zone. Pitches just above
the belt buckle are called balls pretty much
all the time.
This year, Major
League Baseball officials tried to turn those
artists into scientists using the Umpire
Information System, a technology made by a
Deer Park, N.Y., company called QuesTec. With
the help of four video cameras (two at field
level, two in the upper deck), U.I.S. tracks
the flight of each pitch, gauging its speed
and curvature and pinpointing exactly where it
crosses the plate (with a margin of error of
0.4 inches). The visual data are converted
into a single computer image of the action,
making it easy to tell which pitches sail
through the strike zone and which fall
outside.
While U.I.S. is not
designed to call balls and strikes in the
midst of a game, Major League Baseball is
using the system to measure the overall
reliability of its human umpires. Ten of the
30 major-league stadiums have installed
QuesTec technology (the equipment costs about
$40,000 per venue, or about a tenth of a
senior umpire's salary), and in the games
played there, baseball officials have informed
the umpires that their ball-and-strike calls
will be graded against the computer's. If an
umpire's calls disagree with the computer's
more than 10 percent of the time, his
performance will be considered substandard and
possibly held against him in future promotion
considerations and when lucrative post-season
assignments are made.
The umpires are,
naturally, freaked out by QuesTec, no doubt
sensing the kind of doom that New York
subway-token clerks felt when the MetroCard
was rolled out. Many sports columnists rallied
to the umpires' cause this year, criticizing
QuesTec for robbing the game of poetry. But
Sandy Alderson, Major League Baseball's
operations chief, recently confirmed that the
system is ''not going away,'' and that because
of U.I.S., ''umpires are getting better and
better at calling the strike zone.'' The
threat of automation seems to have done
wonders for job performance. Hugo Lindgren
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