On Friday, when the home plate umpire calls the first pitch of the 2025 World Series, savor it. This will be the last championship to be fully adjudicated by human beings.
The Automated Ball-Strike (A.B.S.) challenge system, known informally as the robot ump, is coming to your local major league ballpark on Opening Day in 2026. While human umpires will still call balls and strikes, the A.B.S. will allow teams to dispute calls, with the final judgment going to the computerized system.
Progress compels us to embrace technological accuracy and precision, promising a perfected version of what is to my mind the perfect sport. But baseball is a game of bad calls, bad luck, bad bounces, meteorological whim and unforeseen happenstance — all part of what makes it so perfect.
