THIS IS HOW OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS WILL GET THEIR COLLECTIVE FOOT IN THE DOOR: Over the last few years, there has been a quantum leap forward in baseball knowledge as a result of PitchFX, a system installed now in every major league park that tracks every pitch with incredible accuracy. By measuring and plotting location at every point between release and the plate (or contact), PitchFX shows how much a pitch breaks (both vertically and laterally), when it breaks, and how much a pitcher's fastball "hides" his breaking ball (i.e., what is the difference between the arc of different pitches, and when can a batter start to distinguish those arcs?). PitchFX's algorithm will even tell you, based on trajectory and speed, what kind of pitch it is, and will associate every pitch with a result, letting you aggregate data in an infinite number of ways. Because the Internet is awesome, you can even go over to Brooks Baseball and play with the tool yourself. (Coming soon, as I may already have mentioned: HitFX, which will track the speed, location, and trajectory of batted balls.)
Modern technology is now much more accurate than Questec, the old new technology that baseball used (or maybe uses?) to evaluate its umpires. It is capable of giving us accurate, instantaneous information about whether a pitch is a ball or strike. Dave Cameron at Fangraphs and Jeff Sullivan at Lookout Landing, among probably millions of others, are now asking: why do we still have umpires calling balls and strikes? Inconsistency among umpires, unnecessary error rates, players and managers getting thrown out for arguing, and different strike zones depending upon the prior success of the guy on the mound -- what about that is worth defending? Or, as Sullivan quotes Tom Tango as asking, if baseball started with a system that provided 100% accuracy on balls and strikes, would we now advocate junking it in favor of the present system?
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