For more than 30 years, Angel Hernandez has terrorized major league baseball with his terrible performances behind home plate. His inability to consistently and accurately call balls and strikes defies belief. His ability to keep his job could be a case study in the unbelievable.
Appreciate these final displays of ineptitude because the automated strike zone is coming. The days of strikes that are called balls and balls that are called strikes are numbered for Hernandez and his fellow nightmare-inducing umpire colleagues like C.B. Bucknor, Hunter Wendelstedt, Doug Eddings, Ron Kulpa and....you know what, we better stop there before the list fills this whole page.
Bob Nightengale dropped that nugget into his latest notebook pointing out how the automated strike zone, "which is definitely coming within the next two years," will limit catcher-interference injuries like the one suffered by Willson Contreras.
It's only a matter of time before MLB institutes automated ball-strike system
The automated ball-strike (ABS) challenge system is currently being tested in the minor leagues. Major league pitchers making rehab stints have already gotten to experience it (Red Sox pitcher Nick Pivetta is not a fan).
The challenge system wouldn't totally remove the human element from MLB games. The Hawk-Eye “robot ump” tracks each pitch in addition to the human umpire making their call. Teams have a set number of challenges (right now, three) to use if they believe the umpire got the call wrong. If the call is changed, they get that challenge back. If it is upheld, they lose the challenge.
In that sense, Hernandez and company can still ruin games with their inaccuracy, but their impact will be curbed when it comes to potentially game-changing calls.
The challenge system could certainly give way to a fully-automated strike zone with robot umpires making the home plate umpire obsolete, at least when it comes to balls and strikes. It may be an inevitability.
Now if we could just figure out how to get rid of all the terrible calls elsewhere on the diamond...