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There\u2019s nothing going on in baseball this week, so as a diversion we\u2019re 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.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Plato: For. There\u2019s an ideal invisible form of the strike zone, the true reality, and every pitch seeks to embody that form.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s being forced to accept something without question, I\u2019m good.<\/p>\n
Aristotle: I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Gorgias: Hey, I just want to add that I\u2019m 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\u2019m not even mad. Once they invent the paper, don\u2019t put in the paper that I was\u2014<\/p>\n
Democritus: OK, buddy, that\u2019s enough. If truth doesn\u2019t exist, you\u2019re going to have to find another explanation for why I\u2019m throwing you out right now.<\/p>\n
Lao Tzu: For, sort of. The only true knowledge is the knowledge of the self. Any attempt to derive external knowledge obfuscates one\u2019s 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\u2019re out, or just walked.<\/p>\n
Aquinas: For. Look, this isn\u2019t complicated. There\u2019s a big book full of rules, and everyone just has to follow them as thoroughly and precisely as humanly possible. Even though they\u2019re doomed to failure. If I\u2019m not making it clear, ABS is literally God.<\/p>\n
Hume: Against. All knowledge is derived from sensory experience. It\u2019s fine for umpires to have individual strike zones that each team has to adjust to over the course of the game. That\u2019s how life works. We build the concept of a strike not through higher law, but through shared social convention.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s a heavy-handed imposition of power for power\u2019s sake. No one\u2019s getting to vote on this.<\/p>\n
Hobbes: For. Good, you shouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s still better than that asshole Gorgias\u2014if you let him get his way, baseball stops meaning anything.<\/p>\n
Hegel: Against. Arguing with the umpire is dialectics. I\u2019d explain further but you wouldn\u2019t understand it.<\/p>\n
Luther: For. Big believer in challenge systems.<\/p>\n
Locke: For. What Descartes said. It\u2019s a social contract and you signed up for it by being born here. If you don\u2019t like it, start learning cricket, or make your own baseball league with your own rules.<\/p>\n
Marx: Yeah, weird, it\u2019s almost like there\u2019s a reason they can\u2019t 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!<\/p>\n
Bergson: Against. Stop making everything about politics, Karl. Besides, it doesn\u2019t 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\u2019re not empowered to question the legitimacy of a strike, to interact with it, you\u2019re just robots, and we should just play the game on spreadsheets.<\/p>\n
G.E. Moore: For. Hey, man, we\u2019ve 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\u2019re having babies, by getting rid of the germs we can\u2019t \u201cperceive.\u201d If you\u2019re cool with that, feels like you should be cool with using basic tools to get balls and strikes right.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ll eventually correct their aberrant behavior.<\/p>\n
Schr\u00f6dinger: Wait. So you\u2019re saying that the strike zone is\u2026 a box? And that pitches sometimes go into the box, and sometimes don\u2019t go in the box? Come back to me, I feel like I\u2019m on to something.<\/p>\n
W. James: For, apathetically. Look, it doesn\u2019t matter what I think personally. From a pragmatic standpoint, as long as this gets people to shut up more, it\u2019s worth it.<\/p>\n
Wittgenstein: Indifferent. I\u2019m 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\u2019t taken yet. We\u2019re not running out. Call one \u201cstr\u00fckes\u201d or something, I don\u2019t care. If you tell me a guy is throwing a lot of strikes today, what does that mean? The lack of clarity disgusts me.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Russell: I bet you\u2019re also very fun at parties.<\/p>\n
Nietzsche: I\u2026 would not know.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t \t\t\tThank you for reading<\/p>\n
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