Ex-ump Garcia worries about impact of overturned robot ump calls - ESPN

NEW YORK — Richie Garcia is worried about the impact that robot umpires will have on their human counterparts.

Major League Baseball introduced the Automated Ball-Strike System for regular-season play this season starting with the New York Yankees' opener at San Francisco on Wednesday night, giving teams a chance to appeal strike zone decisions to a system based on 12 Hawk-Eye cameras.

«I think it's embarrassing, embarrassing to the umpires that are calling the game. Nobody likes to be humiliated in front of 30,000, 40,000 people,» said Garcia, a major league umpire from 1975-99. «What Major League Baseball is saying is: I don't trust the umpire's strike zone, so I'm going to use something that's going to be operated by some computer geek that knows nothing about baseball, and he's the one that's going to measure this and measure that because he's got a Ph.D. in physics or whatever the hell he's got a degree in.»

Garcia drew criticism for not calling a strike on a 2-2 pitch from San Diego's Mark Langston to the Yankees' Tino Martinez in the 1998 World Series opener, and Martinez hit a tiebreaking grand slam on the next offering that sparked New York to a four-game sweep.

Umpires keep improving

While there is constant debate over calls, umpires were overall their most accurate ever last year. Just not as perfect as technology.

There were 368,898 regular-season pitches called by big league umps last season, an average of 152 per game. The 92.83% accuracy rate was the highest — an average of 10.88 missed calls per game, according to MLB. That is down from an average of 16.58 missed calls per game in 2016, when the accuracy rate was 89.31%.

«I'm 60 and it seems to me like the younger generation really wants this technology