It took Max Scherzer one start to decide he absolutely hates Rob Manfred's roboumps

Veteran righty Max Scherzer has earned his reputation as something of an old-school pitcher. This is true in the baseball sense: Scherzer has led the league in innings pitched two separate times and continues to take pride in working deep into games in the era of third-time-through-the-order penalties and five-and-dive. But it's also true in a more personal one: This is a man who once started taking his pants off in the dugout in protest of what he deemed to be excessive substance checks, and nearly blew a gasket after being ejected from a start against the Los Angeles Dodgers two years ago due to stickiness on his pitching hand.

All of which made his start on Tuesday afternoon appointment viewing. Not just because it was his first time taking the mound as a member of the Toronto Blue Jays, but also because it was his first time taking the mound under the watchful eye of MLB's new automated ball-strike (ABS) challenge system. And as you might imagine, putting Scherzer in the same vicinity as a robot led to some hilarious fireworks.

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New roboump system isn't what Max Scherzer is actually mad about

For the uninitiated, the ABS system uses a technologically generated strike zone to allow teams to challenge any given ball-strike call that they suspect was incorrect. After years of testing in independent ball and the Minor Leagues, this is the first time that it's come to MLB spring training, where it's quickly become a topic of conversation.

You can count Scherzer among those who don't get what all the fuss is about. In the first inning, just 11 pitches in to his start, Scherzer threw what home-plate umpire Roberto Ortiz ruled to be a strike on the outside corner to St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Lars Nootbaar. But Nootbaar disagreed, and after review the call was overturned to a ball. Scherzer would eventually come back to get the strike out, but the fun was just beginning.

The next inning, Scherzer threw a curveball to infielder JJ Wetherholt that Ortiz ruled a ball just below the zone. Scherzer, hoping to get a little revenge, immediately issued a challenge of his own ... only for the call to be upheld.

Scherzer would get out of the inning unscathed as part of an impressive debut with Toronto. But if you thought that might help him put this roboump snafu behind him, well, think again.

“I’m a little skeptical on this,” Scherzer said, courtesy of The Athletic.

“I get what we’re trying to do here, but I think Major League umpires are really good. They’re really good. So what are we actually changing here? We know there are going to be strikes that are changed to balls, and balls that are changed to strikes.. So we’re going to basically be even. So are we actually going to improve the game? Are the umpires really that bad? I don’t think so.”

But the righty was far from finished. In fact, he was just getting started: He went on to describe the entire history of pitcher-umpire relations, how a pitcher might get a little wiggle room off the plate if he hit his spot but that umpires wouldn't reward a backup slider that just happened to nick the strike zone.

“That’s kind of how we’ve always played baseball,” Scherzer said. “That’s kind of what looks normal. You know, when you get to this (robot) world, if we’re going to sit there and say it’s a laser zone, then we don’t care about if a pitcher hits his spot or not.”

What followed was a lengthy back-and-forth on the exact nature of the strike zone, and whether it was two-dimensional or three-dimensional. (The answer: MLB has learned that ABS is more accurate when it considers a 2D strike zone, basically a big pane of glass placed in the middle of home plate.) At that point, Scherzer could only throw up his hands.

“Can we just play baseball?” he asked reporters. “We’re humans. Can we just be judged by humans? Do we really need to disrupt the game? I think humans are defined by humans.”

On the one hand, it's easy to empathize with an athlete trying his best to navigate an opaque system whose technology he can't really hope to understand. On the other ... I mean, the ball was called correctly the first time. Is Scherzer actually concerned with technoethics in sport, or is he just a little embarrassed that the pitch he was so sure had caught the bottom of the zone actually missed by a considerable margin? The ABS system is still at least a year away from appearing in regular-season games, and we can only hope that Scherzer hasn't retired by then.