Keyser: Robot umps? These aspiring MLB umpires are learning the craft
From Hannah Keyser at Yahoo! Sports on April 15, 2020:
Over three days of umpire camp — not to be confused with umpire school, more on that later — there is little attention paid to the strike zone. I’m loath to lead with a detail like that, which lends itself to too many punchlines. At ump camp, which is focused on education and not even evaluation, they don’t teach students how to distinguish between balls and strikes and isn’t that just rich? No wonder they’re so bad, you’re thinking, or getting ready to tweet alongside a screengrab of this paragraph. No wonder they’re all getting replaced by robots.
And in a way it’s schadenfreude as a form of self-defense. The increasing mechanization of all sorts of industries will put people in a huge swath of professions out of work. Robots are coming for all of our jobs; but they’re coming for umpires’ jobs imminently and on a public stage.
Read the full article here: https://sports.yahoo.com/forget-robot-umps-these-very-real-humans-want-to-umpire-the-future-of-baseball-195136167.html
Originally published: April 16, 2020. Last Updated: April 16, 2020.