Welcome to the Wednesday edition of The Cooler, where hopefully I still do this job better than a robot would. Let's get to it:
*As technology has evolved in life and sports, altering so many things about our day-to-day existence, a movement has emerged among baseball enthusiasts to use Pitch f/x tracking data to call balls and strikes.
The shorthand for this is "robot umpires," which maybe creates more than a scare for purists than is necessary. There obviously wouldn't be a sleek non-human behind the plate. A human would still be there. But instead of that human, with vision limits, biases and interpretations calling balls and strikes, calls would be determined instead by tracking data.
The movement has had fits and starts, but it probably gained some traction Tuesday when the Yankees were eliminated by the Red Sox with a 4-3 loss in the ALDS Game 4.
After the game, Yankees starter CC Sabathia did not hold back his thoughts about home plate umpire Angel Hernandez (who also had a rough series on the bases).
"He's absolutely terrible," said Sabathia, who was lifted after just three innings. "He was terrible behind the plate today. He was terrible at first base. It's amazing how he's getting jobs umpiring in these playoff games."
These things get magnified in the postseason, but they only underscore just how hard it is to call balls and strikes.
MLB used to claim that umpires got 97 percent of ball-strike calls correct, which obviously isn't perfect but would certainly be acceptable for something so subjective. But HBO debunked that a couple years ago with a study of more than three years of pitch data showing the figure was more like 88 percent.
