David Murphy: Feeling conflicted about an automated system in baseball, even as players and fans should benefit

David Murphy, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Sep 25, 2025

Published in Baseball

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PHILADELPHIA — There’s something you need to understand in order to fully appreciate the magnitude of baseball’s newly announced Automated Balls and Strikes challenge system.

You may think that it sounds like a no-brainer. What harm can come from allowing batters, pitchers and catchers a couple of chances a game to appeal for a near-instantaneous ruling on a borderline (or not so borderline) pitch?

Umpires are human, and human judgment is fallible, and sometimes that fallible human judgment ends up skewing the outcome of a baseball game. Thanks to the wonders of technology, there now exists a quick and easy way to remove some of that fallibility and, thus, to better ensure that final scores are representative of the play on the field.

I mean, how could anybody be against that? Right?

Sorry, I don’t mean to chuckle condescendingly. Let me tell you a little bit about the sport in question here.

For the last 122 years, Major League Baseball has served as an important cultural counterweight to the spirit of progress coursing through the rest of modern-day life. As towpaths became railroads and railroads became highways, the ballpark was the one place you could find something that was as slow and plodding as it had always been.

See, the sport of baseball has always been built on a bedrock of resistance to change. The next time you watch Kyle Schwarber park one in the second deck, remind yourself that there are still people out there who would have rather watched Jesús Luzardo stand in the back corner of the batter’s box and take three fastballs down Broadway without ever lifting the bat from his shoulder. No disrespect to those people. It takes all types, including the type that has no place better to be. Unfortunately, the rest of us were treated as subversives for suggesting that baseball would be more watchable if National League lineups were allowed to include a designated hitter like Schwarber. Yet, there are still fans out there who think his 54 home runs are a mark of the beast.

Baseball is unique in this regard. While football introduced the forward pass and basketball added the 3-point line, baseball stuck to the original recipe for more than a century. Nine innings. Three outs. Ninety feet between bases and 60 feet, 6 inches from the mound to home. It was a sport for those who longed for the days when whiskey was an anesthetic and doctors were smoking Lucky Strikes in the delivery room.

Robo umps? We’re still not sure about Roombas.

Long story short, it’s tough to sell ABS (Automated Ball-Strike Systems) to people who are still trying to wrap their heads around ABS (Anti-Lock Brake Systems).

You know what, though?

I get it.

To be clear, I’m fully on board with baseball’s new system. Phillies fans have seen enough of Phil Cuzzi’s one-man shows to deserve a preventive mechanism. We should all be in favor of a system that guards against the level of umpire incompetence that the Phillies have seen this season, including Cuzzi’s July 8 spectacle when he missed 20 calls, including three major ones, in a loss to the Giants. People like to argue that an automated ball-strike system removes the human element from the game. That’s like saying autopilot removes the human element of flying. The important thing is that it removes the human element of crashing.

That being said, I suspect that the resistance to ABS is deeper than a traditionalist desire for things to remain as they always were. It’s more so rooted in the inherent tension of the digital age. Deep down inside, all of us recognize the corrosive societal effects of the technologies that have replaced human-to-human interaction. From ATMs replacing bank tellers to kiosks replacing checkout clerks to our smartphones replacing pretty much everything else, daily life is fast becoming a place that is lived within one’s own isolated bubble. Most of us aren’t entirely comfortable with it.

Do I think baseball’s new ABS system makes sense? I do. Do I think its logical end is a fully automated system replacing umpires entirely? I do. Am I comfortable with that? I’m not, and I’m well aware that it doesn’t entirely make sense.

The thing about new technology is that the skeptics and critics are rarely proven right in the long run. The long arc of history almost always ends up regarding such people the same way it did the cavemen who argued the downsides of the wheel. Sure, there are some exceptions. Social media, skinny jeans — both have had grave consequences for mankind. Mostly, though, the story of humanity is one of innovation toward a new normal, one that future generations cannot live without.

At the same time, I’m not entirely opposed to the idea that baseball should remain a place where people can escape from their daily Black Mirror episode. I understand if people view ABS as one more step down the slippery slope to total impersonality.

Maybe I’m just getting old.