How many fans want their child, grandchild, ... to play catcher or even be a plate umpire? Why not? Then why is it OK for anyone to be subjected to the unnecessary physical abuse of those activities?
Spring games to feature automated ball-strike challenge system by Jesse Rogers Feb 18, 2025
The league believes a challenge system would be less disruptive while retaining the human elements of the game, including pitch framing by catchers.
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This article reads like an inept joke. Yeah, who doesn't go to the ballpark to see live pitch framing?
Hello, ALL pitches are currently called by automation and have been for years. We see it on television but not at the ballpark. We tend to side with the automation over the plate umpire almost all the time, partly because the strike zone is such a ridiculous imaginary concept. We cannot touch it. It touches nothing. It varies with each batter but only vertically, not horizontally.
Finally, both the catching position and plate umpire should be eliminated because both are barbaric and obviously unnecessary. Both could stand behind a protective screen behind the plate.
Or the entire mess could have been something simple and non automated for more than a century. Put a physical target back there. Hit it for a strike, you know, like stick ball played against a concrete wall with a rectangle drawn on it. Try an archery bull's eye on a tripod.
The metaphor for the catcher is backstop. A human being is playing a physical barrier. The catcher wears the "tools of ignorance".
Both the catcher and plate umpire have been needlessly getting pounded in the head and that pounding has increased with the velocity of the pitches.
Worst of all, even if all the pitches were called by machine, many fans want the catcher and plate umpire to remain in their current positions so that it looks the same.
Eliminating the barbaric catcher position has many benefits including eliminating embarrassingly stupid finger signs. Thursday, September 7, 2017
Imaginary strike zone. Saturday, August 8, 2009
There are no physical limits to the strike zone. It is an imaginary three dimensional area hovering above ground. To make it even more elusive, it's size varies with each batter.
The pitcher imagines its location, then throws and hopes to place the ball within it. The batter imagines where it might be and swings through that area. Finally, the plate umpire imagines whether a baseball traveling over ninety miles per hour and moving erratically has passed through any part of it or possibly grazed the edge of it.
Pretty stupid. Especially when it's totally unnecessary. Just place an object behind home plate as a target and judge whether or not a pitch has hit it. Jeez, is that so complicated? Try an archery bull's eye on a tripod. Aside from being a fool proof strike zone, it allows those two most pathetic human beings, the catcher and plate umpire, to move out of harm's way ...
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