There’s nothing going on in baseball this week, so as a diversion we’re going to take a tour of the greatest philosophical minds in recorded history, and ask the obvious question if one were to get only one: How do they feel about the automated ball-strike system coming to Major League Baseball in 2026? What is the nature of truth? What are the epistemological and logical ramifications of acceding the nature of the strike call to an invisible higher authority? Would Kant have enjoyed a baseball game? (No, he would have hated it, and also if he had loved it, he still would not have enjoyed it, because enjoying things diminishes them.)
Gorgias: Against. There is no such thing as a strike, and if there were, we could never possibly know it. I am very fun at parties.
Plato: For. There’s an ideal invisible form of the strike zone, the true reality, and every pitch seeks to embody that form.
Heraclitus: Against. This will translate into fewer ejections, and the only reason I watch baseball is to see people with blinding hate in their hearts.
Confucius: For. I was fine with the old system, too, because an umpire is essentially the father of the players, and you should always obey your father. But then, the league is the father of the umpires, so they have to obey, too. As long as someone’s being forced to accept something without question, I’m good.
Aristotle: I don’t even know what I think. All I know is that the baseball is made up of mud and air, somehow, which is why the ball spins when you throw it.
Gorgias: Hey, I just want to add that I’m not at all bitter that the only reason anyone even knows who I am anymore is because Plato delivered the 400 BC equivalent of the quote-tweet dunk on me. I’m not even mad. Once they invent the paper, don’t put in the paper that I was—
Democritus: OK, buddy, that’s enough. If truth doesn’t exist, you’re going to have to find another explanation for why I’m throwing you out right now.
Lao Tzu: For, sort of. The only true knowledge is the knowledge of the self. Any attempt to derive external knowledge obfuscates one’s true purpose, and the drive for that knowledge inevitably corrupts. Therefore: no one should know what the count is at any time. ABS can tell a batter when they’re out, or just walked.
Aquinas: For. Look, this isn’t complicated. There’s a big book full of rules, and everyone just has to follow them as thoroughly and precisely as humanly possible. Even though they’re doomed to failure. If I’m not making it clear, ABS is literally God.
Hume: Against. All knowledge is derived from sensory experience. It’s fine for umpires to have individual strike zones that each team has to adjust to over the course of the game. That’s how life works. We build the concept of a strike not through higher law, but through shared social convention.
Descartes: For. The act of creating ABS is our shared social convention. We have basic precepts for what a strike is, all we need to do is employ logic based on those precepts. Also, institute instant replay on every play, whether the team challenges or not. After all, the goal of truth is certainty, no matter how ugly or how many delays it requires. I am also very fun at parties.
Marx: Against. Our shared convention? Lol. Lmao, even. The strike zone is just an arbitrary set of values assigned by an uncaring god, or worse, 30 uncaring billionaires and their millionaire toady. It’s a heavy-handed imposition of power for power’s sake. No one’s getting to vote on this.
Hobbes: For. Good, you shouldn’t get to vote on this. Letting people have opinions leads to anarchy. Better off to have one strike zone, one rule, everyone obeys. Tyranny sucks but it’s still better than that asshole Gorgias—if you let him get his way, baseball stops meaning anything.
Hegel: Against. Arguing with the umpire is dialectics. I’d explain further but you wouldn’t understand it.
Luther: For. Big believer in challenge systems.
Locke: For. What Descartes said. It’s a social contract and you signed up for it by being born here. If you don’t like it, start learning cricket, or make your own baseball league with your own rules.
Marx: Yeah, weird, it’s almost like there’s a reason they can’t just do that. Some sort of law in favor of the bourgeoisie that keeps getting protected by nine old people no one voted for. How strange!
Bergson: Against. Stop making everything about politics, Karl. Besides, it doesn’t matter. The idea of a strike is just that, an intuition, and the act of formalizing it sucks the blood and the humanity right out of it. If you’re not empowered to question the legitimacy of a strike, to interact with it, you’re just robots, and we should just play the game on spreadsheets.
G.E. Moore: For. Hey, man, we’ve got these things now called microscopes. You should try one, you can see all sorts of wild shit in there, like cells and bacteria. And that means we can start washing our hands and stop killing women when they’re having babies, by getting rid of the germs we can’t “perceive.” If you’re cool with that, feels like you should be cool with using basic tools to get balls and strikes right.
Freud: Against. The old system was fine. The individual umpire is the ego, keeping the id of the players honest, while the league office works as the superego of the umpires, keeping them in check. Let their wrists get slapped in private later, they’ll eventually correct their aberrant behavior.
Schrödinger: Wait. So you’re saying that the strike zone is… a box? And that pitches sometimes go into the box, and sometimes don’t go in the box? Come back to me, I feel like I’m on to something.
W. James: For, apathetically. Look, it doesn’t matter what I think personally. From a pragmatic standpoint, as long as this gets people to shut up more, it’s worth it.
Wittgenstein: Indifferent. I’m just annoyed that a pitch outside the zone that someone swings at, and a pitch inside the zone, share the same name. Why are they the same word? There are so many combinations of consonants and vowels that aren’t taken yet. We’re not running out. Call one “strükes” or something, I don’t care. If you tell me a guy is throwing a lot of strikes today, what does that mean? The lack of clarity disgusts me.
Nietzsche: Against. Cowering beneath the scientific method has made Western civilization spineless and weak. Players should be allowed to argue balls and strikes, and thus through the force of their will make the truths of their own lives. All baseball is an act of submission, a purposeful limitation of the infinite possibility and power that is man. The batter should be able to beat the umpire to death with the bat if he disagrees with the call, or die in the effort. Anything less is slavery.
Russell: I bet you’re also very fun at parties.
Nietzsche: I… would not know.
Thank you for reading
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