{"id":645250,"date":"2026-03-26T20:56:17","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T20:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/645250\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T20:56:17","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T20:56:17","slug":"castle-rock-resident-ex-mlb-umpire-says-robo-umps-are-chumps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/645250\/","title":{"rendered":"Castle Rock resident, ex-MLB umpire says robo umps are chumps"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can\u2019t spell \u201cABS\u201d<\/a> without a little \u201cBS\u201d at the end. If all Earl Weaver has to do to win an argument at home plate<\/a> is kick a plug out of the wall, is it really baseball?<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople used to say we were the integrity of the game, that the umpires held the integrity of the game,\u201d former Major League Baseball ump Paul Emmel<\/a> told me Thursday morning. \u201cAnd the integrity of the game is being removed from the umpires.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou want to bring the technology to make people be better, bring technology to help me be better. But in this instance, I\u2019m not sure it accomplished that goal. I think it\u2019s removing the integrity of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rockies lift the lid on their 2026 season Friday in Miami with a pinch of history on the side. It\u2019ll be the first regular-season MLB game in Colorado history to use robotic umpires \u2014 or rather, to use robo-ump oversight.<\/p>\n

Major League Baseball this year is debuting its Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System<\/a>, in which batters, pitchers or catchers can instantly appeal a ball or strike call at home plate.<\/p>\n

All calls will be checked by a framework that utilizes the 12 Hawk-Eye cameras that are universal to all MLB parks. According to Baseball Savant, MLB\u2019s advanced stats page, ABS will judge balls and strikes from a zone with a width of 17 inches (same as home plate), with the top of the zone altered by batter to 53.5% of a player\u2019s listed height without cleats, and a bottom set at 27% of the player\u2019s listed height. Strikes\/balls are judged when a ball passes the middle of the plate, not the front of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut each player has a different strike zone,\u201d said Emmel, who retired in July 2024 and calls Castle Rock home.<\/a> \u201cI don\u2019t know if anybody (who calibrates ABS) has ever seen Greg Maddux, who can miss the front edge of the plate and hit the back of the strike zone. I don\u2019t know if they\u2019ve ever seen Justin Verlander\u2019s high curveball fall from 12 to 6, hit the high side of the strike zone and then hit the catcher in the legs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Emmel, 57, isn\u2019t some fogey who\u2019s into yelling at clouds<\/a> and telling the tech kids to get off his lawn. But he is proudly old-school by nature. And an even prouder Artificial Intelligence (AI) skeptic.<\/p>\n

The Michigan native, who made his MLB debut in 1999 and worked a World Series, three League Championship Series, eight Division Series and two All-Star games over the next two-plus decades, has seen some \u2026 stuff.<\/p>\n

Paul recalled to me how he worked a playoff tilt once and was in the locker room pregame watching Yankees-Blue Jays on TV next to Joe Torre and Jim Leyland. All of a sudden, the strike-zone box disappeared from the broadcast feed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember calls being made,\u201d Emmel chuckled. \u201cAnd I\u2019m paraphrasing here, but the person on the phone said that the person who set the box on the TV got tired and went home.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, we\u2019re looking around the room like, \u2018What?’\u201d<\/p>\n

Which, in hindsight, is how one becomes an AI apostate.<\/p>\n

Look, Emmel never professed to be perfect, which is also his point. He\u2019s been good, though \u2014 the website, umpscorecard.com, graded the Colorado resident as having 91.65% accuracy on calls from 2015-2022.<\/a><\/p>\n

His peers, past and present, have been getting better, too. In 2025, according to MLB, umps recorded a 92.83% accuracy rate on ball\/strike calls, the best percentage ever recorded by the league, and up more than three points from 2016 (89.31%). The umpires\u2019 10.88 missed calls per game were down from 16.58 misses nine years earlier.<\/p>\n

\u201cI get it in tennis,\u201d Emmel continued. \u201cBut what\u2019s next for baseball (once this) conversation (moves) down the road? Right now, the only things that are out there and subjective are check swings and balks. How do you take check swings and balks out of our hands?<\/p>\n

\u201cI called a balk against Oakland (in 2004)<\/a>, and I was wrong. And I was right for the wrong reasons. Are they going to be able to challenge check swings? Are they going to be able to challenge balks?\u201d<\/p>\n

Curious, I reached out earlier this week to a current MLB umpire I know to talk about ABS. Citing league policy, he respectfully declined to comment. Emmel told me he thinks the crews dealing with the new tech are \u201cless than cautiously optimistic \u2026 I would say very skeptical\u201d about ABS going forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve seen boxes move each game. If you\u2019ve got Aaron Judge (who stands 6-foot-7) and Jose Altuve (5-6), you\u2019re changing the box \u2026 I know in and out, up and down. How do I know where your boxes are?<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re always going to have a pitch (being missed) here or there. But (with) the statistics in baseball, it all washes out in the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like a lot of us, Emmel jumped into some deep convos about the pros and cons of AI these days. He\u2019s got friends who run businesses. He\u2019s got friends in the tech industry. He wrestles with AI usage with UMPS CARE, a nonprofit founded by MLB umpires of which he serves as vice president.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I find fault (in some CEOs\u2019) arguments,\u201d said Emmel, who\u2019ll host UMP CARE\u2019s annual \u201cFairway to the Rockies\u201d golf outing at Red Hawk Ridge Golf Course on June 11.<\/a> \u201cOn one hand, you can\u2019t turn a blind eye to something new that\u2019s coming through the tunnel. On the other hand, God creates us to be human, and that human interaction and that human empathy \u2014 those are things that aren\u2019t computerized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Being 100% right on calls, being 100% certain, absolutely matters, Emmel says. But once you\u2019ve opened Pandora\u2019s box when it comes to homogenization in baseball, he wondered, where does it end? Variance, human variance, quirky variance, has always been at the core of The Show.<\/p>\n

Baseball used to be the only major North American sport that didn\u2019t use a clock of some kind. It\u2019s still the only major North American sport in which the dimensions of the playing field vary widely by city and venue. Although Emmel wonders how long that last one will last.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe argument was that in baseball, there are all these (quirks) we\u2019ve used to elevate this sport in culture, and all those things were good,\u201d Emmel said. \u201cBut now all those things seem to be bad. They didn\u2019t have this technology back in the \u201970s, when they were playing two-hour games.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is why Emmel\u2019s not a fan of the pitch clock, either. He says it takes away from conversations. And that baseball has always been a conversational game \u2014 pitcher to catcher, catcher to umpire, hitter to umpire, first baseman to runner, shortstop to second baseman, third baseman to his coach.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe game\u2019s gone silent,\u201d Emmel said. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to save the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other day, to decompress, Emmel took a lawn chair out to a park, cracked open a 6-pack and watched some local kids play baseball. Know what? He didn\u2019t yell at a single cloud. Not once.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I don\u2019t know that I would get the same enjoyment out of going to a big-league game anymore,\u201d Emmel sighed. \u201cI don\u2019t understand where it\u2019s going.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You can\u2019t spell \u201cABS\u201d without a little \u201cBS\u201d at the end. If all Earl Weaver has to do…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":645251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2405],"tags":[106,5,167,52,4316,4722,7998,817,388,853,4901,2125,4,13669,1027,168,2094,2095,185,430,53738,1039],"class_list":["post-645250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-colorado-rockies","tag-aaron-judge","tag-baseball","tag-colorado","tag-colorado-rockies","tag-coloradorockies","tag-greg-maddux","tag-jim-leyland","tag-jose-altuve","tag-justin-verlander","tag-latest-headlines","tag-michigan","tag-minor-league-baseball","tag-mlb","tag-mlb-all-star-game","tag-more-rockies-news","tag-rockies","tag-rockies-takes","tag-sean-keeler","tag-sports","tag-sports-columnists","tag-the-show","tag-world-series"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116297478068722543","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/645251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}