Just a few thoughts about baseball and where it is going

I spent my entire working career in IT and I am a believer in IT but I am not sure that IT is the way of the future in baseball. Granted pretty much everyone has jumped on the analytics bandwagon right now but someday soon someone will win the World Series with a new system and everyone will be flocking to that new process.

IT and analytics can give you all the stats of what happened in the past in a microsecond but it can not predict the future, if it could, we would not need to play the games. Yes the computer can tell you what is likely to happen but that is far from a sure thing. When was the last time you saw a computer tell you before the Spring Training began who is going to win the different MLB divisions and go on to win the World Series? As long as baseball is played by humans with all their frailties, it will continue to be an unpredictable (if it wasn’t, who would watch) and you can have all the computer power in the world at your fingertips but you still won’t know who will win the World Series in 2022 even when there are only 30 choices.

Don’t get me wrong, I have worked with computers since 1969 and I love computers but computers are not the answer for everything. That said, I think that having a computer call balls and strikes is a good thing and will make baseball and even better game than what it already is by evening the playing field. Bring it on and the sooner the better.

Umpires do the best they can but they are human and they have their own biases. Maybe they don’t think they do but they do, everyone does. Maybe they like a certain pitcher, or a certain batter and just one call in favor of the batter or the pitcher can change the entire game and even an entire season. Do rookies get the the same calls as veterans? Maybe a pitcher gives that umpire a look he thinks shows him up? What about the checked swings? You have to figure that a computer can do a better job at getting those right than umpires can today.

I am old school baseball having started following it in 1957 and I do not like things like pitch counts, shifts, everybody and their brother making the playoffs, openers, pulling the starter after a couple of turns through the batting order, more coaches than players, I don’t care how fast the ball left the yard, (it is still only one run) or what the elevation was, seven inning double-headers or starting extra inning games with a runner on second or 3+ hour games. I am not even going to go into high ticket prices and escalating player salaries. You can call me an old fart or whatever you want but I know what constitutes good baseball in my eyes.

I don’t want to see umpires eliminated, they will still have plenty to do, just don’t let them call strikes and balls anymore. Oh, one more thing, if a batter leaves the batters box to adjust his batting gloves? Automatic ball called. If that is a problem for a batter maybe he should quit using the gloves and do it the way it used to be done. Is Spring Training for the Minnesota Twins far off? I can’t wait.