Baseball is known as the American sport that is built on tradition and history. However, the MLB (Major League Baseball) is planning to make a huge change. 

Starting in the 2026 season, they are planning to bring Automated ball and strike systems or AI umpiring to the game that everyone loves to watch. 

The League thinks this will make the game more accurate, but I believe it is the wrong move for the future of baseball. Baseball doesn’t need a robot to call the ball and strike for us, it is based on judgment to where the player has to adjust to what human judgment is and go from there. A human element is what makes the game so special for all of us.

Baseball is not a perfect sport, so that’s why it’s okay when people mess up. The players or the fans get frustrated when the umpires make the best call, but that is part of life, for every human is not perfect. 

Every player that is playing the game that they love is not always going to have a perfect game, it just is not possible. Baseball is part of history, it goes back all the way to the 1920s, so there is so much history that baseball holds. Throughout the lifetime of baseball, there have been games that will be talked about forever, and that’s why people love the game so much.

Think about all the times where there is an argument between the manager and the umpire because of the call that got made.  Where the manager gets ejected to where that fires up the team. There is a close call that ends a game that could have gone a different direction, to where fans talk about it for years. If we bring computers in to make the call, all those moments of excitement disappear.

Bringing AI into baseball takes the skills of the players away that they have worked on for their whole lives to become the players they are today. 

Catchers spend years practicing framing the ball to make the pitch look like a strike, and they have to adjust to the empire strike zone as well. This is a valuable part of baseball. 

But if we make a computer make all the ball and strike calls, then pitch framing will become useless. Players also have to learn to adjust all the different umpires they see at every game they play. 

Each player plays around 162 games a year and they don’t see the same umpire every game and each umpire has a different strike zone, so all the players have to adjust to that. That has always been the challenging part of baseball, but that makes the game. Taking this away makes baseball less about adapting and more about letting technology control baseball.

Some people might argue that bringing AI into baseball would make it more fair. Although this could be true, technology is not always perfect either. The system could glitch and miss the pitches, or it could just not work at all. 

They started testing out the Automated ball and strike in spring training and into the minor league, which they said already added extra time to the game from challenging the strike zone to where it made the game slower. 

Baseball already struggles with the game being too slow. Fans and players wouldn’t connect with games like they used to, it just wouldn’t be as fun to watch and to play in. If every call is made by the computer there is no room for all the emotion that goes on in baseball.

At the end of the day, the game of baseball isn’t about accuracy. If we hand over baseball to AI, we lose the heart of baseball. We all know that the umpires are not perfect, but that is what makes the game more exciting to watch. 

Bringing AI into baseball is not going to make it better, it is just going to take away the very thing that makes baseball worth watching.