Kill the (Robo) Ump!

The following is an excerpt from Bill Kauffman’s talk at the October 11, 2025, Front Porch Republic conference at Baylor University.

When I was a lad of thirteen my friend Tim, who was prematurely hirsute from stern to stem, asked me to sub for him as the umpire of a baseball game for eight-twelve-year-olds.

Sure, I said. How hard could it be? Heck, I’d been playing and watching the game for five years. I was damn near an expert!

Crouching behind the catcher, I pronounced the first pitch a “stee-ball.” It didn’t get any better. As the game’s arbiter I was at best uncertain, at worst wretched. I was the Angel Hernandez of MacArthur Park.

One of the adult managers lacerated me throughout the next six innings. I finished the game, probably shading calls against the abusive prick’s team, and as I unburdened myself of mask and chest protector I swore I would never again gainsay a ruling, no matter how dubious, of the fellow behind the plate.

And for the rest of my inglorious playing career and decades in the bleachers, I never have.

Until now.

“’Kill him! Kill the umpire!’ shouted someone on the stand;
And it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.”

The rhymester Ernest Thayer would find even less joy in Mudville today.

On the same July 2019 day that Jim Bouton, author of the infamous tell-all book Ball Four, died, the independent Atlantic League conducted professional baseball’s first game-long experiment with robot umpires, an event whose catastrophic consequences might be likened to Richard Pryor’s introduction to freebasing cocaine, or John Bolton’s first dorm-room game of Risk. Something wicked this way comes.

I witnessed my first game officiated by the ABS system—automated balls and strikes, or attacking baseball’s soul—two years ago this summer, in a game pitting the storied Rochester Red Wings against the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Railriders. An electronic device stationed behind and above home plate determined balls and strikes. The call was transmitted via an iPhone to an earpiece jammed in the meatus of the now-supernumerary home-plate human umpire, who then gave a weak, half-hearted signal. It was like watching a man’s emasculation with 5,000 other voyeurs.

The game being played on the field was recognizably baseball, but there was something off about the experience, rather like when the niece tells Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers that the pod-people version of her Uncle Ira isn’t Uncle Ira. “There’s something missing,” she says. “Always when he talked to me there was a special look in his eye. That look’s gone. The words, the gestures, everything else is the same—but not the feeling.”

Rule 1.01 of The Official Baseball Rules defines baseball as “a game between two teams of nine players each, under direction of a manager, played on an enclosed field in accordance with these rules, under jurisdiction of one or more umpires.” It doesn’t say the umpires have to be human, but I think that’s kind of assumed.

We are told by ABS advocates that transferring the most significant function of an umpire from human beings to a machine will ensure uniformity and standardization of the strike zone—as if bloodless precision is to be desired. I mean….it’s only a game!

But Fan Duel will not stand for inexactitude.

So much is lost when umps are sacrificed to the true and only religion of the American professional class: progress.

“All umpiring is common sense and judgment,” said a great native son of Waco, Lee Ballanfant, who umped in various Texas minor leagues for ten years before beginning a 22-year career in the National League in 1936. (Ballanfant also said, “The most frequent mistake an umpire makes is calling the play too quickly,” a bit of advice that would have come in handy in my “stee-ball” period.)

Baseball has, or had, a hold on millions of Americans, and two of the primary reasons are 1) it was a game made sublime by stories of human excellence, struggle, and folly; and 2) it begat community.

The cost of its dehumanization will be measured in stories untold, lore foregone, enlivening arguments unmade. Robo-Umps, supplemented by replay reviews, will terminate one of the sport’s idiosyncratic delights: the rhubarb, the heated disputation of an umpire’s call by the manager, oft accompanied by tobacco-spitting—or in our prohibitionist age, sunflower-seed-spitting—finger-pointing, and dirt-kicking, and ending with the manager’s ejection from the contest to a lusty chorus of boos. I hate to recommend use of the instrument that shaped—misshaped—Tyler Robinson, but if you must employ the internet, check out the rhubarb pitting Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver against umpire Bill Haller, in which the ump delivers the ultimate putdown to the bantam jackass Weaver.

On a less clamorous but more important note, the Robo-Ump deprives spectators of the pleasure of grousing, grumbling, or just bantering with neighboring fans over any of a game’s 150 or so ball or strike calls. Of such amiable palaver, repeated over the long weeks of a season, are friendships born or deepened.

Robo-Umps are of a piece with, though much less defensible than, such other replacements of humans by computers as the elimination of line judges in professional tennis and first-down measurements by the chain gang in professional football.

In removing human judges from the games we play or watch, efficiency replaces stories, and the theme of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago is once more affirmed: “Science finds, industry applies, man conforms.”

As Kevin McCarthy—the real one, not the forgotten politician—screams at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, “You’re next!” The majors employed Robo-Umps part-time this year, to rule on challenges, but the blandly sinister commissioner of major league baseball, Rob Manfred, almost surely envisions their full-time employment in the future, if he can buy off or whip the umpire’s union. The writing is on the outfield wall.

Manfred, I regret to say, is an Upstate New York native. As is the commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell. Never put one of us in charge of things.

We talked about this alarming development one night in the 3rd-base bleachers at Batavia’s Dwyer Stadium. Hippie Eddy—a 60-year-old minimum-wage cafeteria worker who at the time was reading Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica—said the Illuminati is behind it. Then again Eddy is so delightfully reactionary, baseball-wise, that he’s in favor of restoring the 9-game World Series that expired in 1921 as well as the practice of outfielders leaving their gloves in the field when they go in to bat.

I would with great pleasure dispatch Robo-Ump back to the techno-hell whence it came.

It’s a stupid fantasy, I know. Verily, I could do little more than hurl rocks at the evil eye, the cyclopean devil high above home plate. But maybe a new generation of tech-savvy saboteurs and baseball loyalists will know what to do.

Image via Freerange.