Unexpected effects of technology on sport
Today I read Jason Koebler's piece on the excellent 404 media about the new Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system introduced in the new Major League Baseball season - the quick summary is that there is a new "AI"-powered1 technology that allows players to challenge strike decisions. Since the strike zone is clearly defined in the rules it is very effective at determining whether the ball was in or out of that zone and so the effect appears to be showing up how unaware umpires and players sometimes are of what is happening around them.
As a cricket fan it's interesting to see a lot of the same things happen in baseball as happened in cricket when various technologies were added to the game over the last couple of decades, including Snicko/UltraEdge2, Hotspot3 and Hawkeye4 (also used in tennis) under the umbrella term of the Decision Review System, or DRS. It's usually had a similar system to the one introduced in baseball where each team has a limited number of incorrect reviews but can keep making them if they're correct.
A lot of controversial decisions in cricket come down to whether the batter hit the ball and if so with what part of their body or bat, since when the ball is caught by a fielder the batter is out if they hit the ball with their bat or gloves but not any other part of their body. Frequently when the ball passes very close to the edge of the bat it can be difficult to tell whether any contact was made or whether it brushed the pads they wear on their legs as protection which can sometimes fool the umpire into thinking the ball hit the bat.
Tied into this is the concept of a batter "walking" (unrelated to the baseball concept with the same name) which is when they voluntarily leave the field before the umpire makes a decision if the batter knows they hit the ball which is considered gentlemanly and therefore associated with English sportsmanship and not so much with Australian gamesmanship.
Before these technologies were brought in commentators who had been former players would often insist in the context of a player not walking that "you know when you've hit it". These days that sentiment is much more rarely heard because over time it became very clear that players sometimes did not, in fact, know when they'd hit it because they would often call for a review when they had hit the ball and were given out, thereby wasting a review for their team.
The dynamic of "bad reviewers" is also familiar to any England fans who had to endure Stuart Broad regularly reviewing when given out while batting regardless of the situation.
Finally the introduction of Hawkeye had a large effect on the number of LBW decisions being given in favour of spin bowlers in countries where spin bowling was usually not favoured by the nature of pitches - in the pre-Hawkeye era batters could use their pads with impunity in the knowledge that umpires would rarely give them out but as soon as the predictive element was showing that in many cases the ball would have actually hit the stumps umpires started giving batters out LBW much more frequently.
It's very early days for ABS in baseball but I'm sure there will be similar repercussions as players and umpires probe the new boundaries of the sport.
How much AI is actually involved I'm not sure, it seems to quite similar to the Hawkeye technology that has existed in tennis and cricket for a long time now. See 4 also.↩
Snicko uses a microphone just behind the stumps (behind the batter) and lines up the sound waves with the video images to see if there is a spike in sound and therefore contact and where the ball was when it happened. UltraEdge (also known as Real Time Snicko) is a more advanced version of the same technology that uses more microphones and is more precise as a result - in the most recent Ashes series between England and Australia there were numerous errors dues to using the older system (which is funded by the broadcaster) including in one case the umpire being fed audio from microphone at the wrong end of the pitch and hence not being able to line up the images properly.↩
Hotspot uses thermal imaging to detect a mark designating contact between the ball and the batter and shows up as a white mark on their bat or body.↩
Hawkeye uses multiple cameras and is mostly used in Leg Before Wicket decisions and has three elements, two factual (where the ball hit the pitch and where it hit the batter's leg) and one predictive (whether the ball would have hit the wicket had it not hit the batters leg)↩