Chipper Jones Thinks Your Pitch Is Outside

I feel like I am an open-minded individual. I can accept that the baseball world is in a constant state of flux: circumstances change, attitudes are reformed, technology evolves. It comes as little surprise, then, that a sportswriter would fire this bottle rocket into the window of tradition:

TIME TO FIX BASEBALL'S MOST BASIC ELEMENT

Next week: can we really trust that the Sun is at the center of the solar system?

Anyway, Chipper Jones recently got all hot and bothered over balls and strikes in a game against the Phillies, throwing his support behind the notorious QuesTec laser targeting system. Dayn Perry is there to take this idea all the way down the rabbit hole.

However, on a larger level Jones is spot on: the quality of home-plate umpiring these days is simply not acceptable. As such, it's time for sweeping changes. Specifically, it's time — past time, actually — to automate the calling of balls and strikes.

Hasn't somebody already automated Chipper? I find it ironic that one of the few things that gets Larry the Affable Automaton into a lather is a robotic GPS system.

Here's the thing: the game of baseball, on a fundamental level, is about the strike zone. All of it — the home runs, the strikeouts, the bunt singles, the walks, the groundball double plays — flows from each hitter's and each pitcher's ability to command the strike zone.

Agreed.

When that zone is called inconsistently, it corrupts the competitive integrity of the game.

Yep.

That's what's happening now, and that's what's been happening for a long time in baseball.

Funny you should mention that...

To put a finer point on it, watch any major-league game and ask yourself whether, say, 25 percent of the ball-strike calls look incorrect after replay or imaging. Over the course of an entire game, it adds up, and that level of inaccuracy makes a mockery of the game.

A lot of things make "a mockery of the game." Phantom tags make a mockery of the game. Greaseballs make a mockery of the game. This sure as hell makes a mockery of the game.

But in regards to cheating, fudging, and bending the rules, well, this kind of stuff has been going on for a long time, and nobody really seems to have a problem with it. Perry is simply doing his best Captain Renault and he is shocked--shocked--to find that people are gambling in the back rooms at Rick's Place.

No doubt, those resistant to such measures will meow about the loss of the nebulous "human element."

Now, I have no feline predilections, but when you are making up "citing" specific statistics like "25 percent of the ball-strike calls look incorrect after replay or imaging," then that human element isn't very "nebulous" by your own definition.

Besides, there's no reason that, in an aesthetic sense, the game need change at all. You'd still have your home-plate umpire suited up and in his usual position. He'd have the computer calls relayed to him by a wireless indicator, and then he'd relay those calls with his typical flair.

Thank the Lord that even though we'll be eliminating the bulk of the umpire's craft, we will preserve the "flair" of the grandstanding officials who so rightly believe that they, not the famous athletes, are the main attraction.

The foundation of sports is fairness

No, no, no, no, no.

The foundation of sport is camaraderie, teamwork, and equanimity. The foundation of professional sport is greed, exclusion, and specialization--especially in baseball, where part of the impetus for forming the first professional leagues was to concoct a profitable business model for team owners and to gradually remove all brown people from the first-tier clubs.

and without a ruthlessly consistent strike zone baseball simply isn't fair.

Things that are also not fair: rainy Saturdays, the U.S. tax code, the continued prominence of Nickelback on mainstream radio, life.

With all the talk about steroids and competitive imbalance and the like, something as mundane and taken-for-granted as the strike zone isn't likely to inspire much in the way of activism.

Maybe because steroids and that old bugbear "competitive imbalance" (whatever that means) are actual problems.

It's time for baseball to repair itself at the most basic level: take ball-strike calls out of the hands of umpires.

And while we're at it, let's take game-calling out of the hands of catchers, plate discipline out of the hands of hitters, and command of the strike zone out of the hands of pitchers. Hell, we could even do away with pitchers entirely, substituting the finest pitching machine technology (which, coincidentally, would still be superior to Jose Mesa). That might finally make Chipper happy.

Or we could recognize that the purpose of these computer targeting systems is to merely evaluate--not replace--the consistency of an umpire's strike zone. It is a tool, not the means to some pie-in-the-sky end where arguing with any umpire is a thing of the past and everyone passes up the most convenient of opportunities to gain a competitive edge.

Like I said, I'm an open-minded person.