Wiffle ball strike zone plans12/24/2023 ![]() Lip-readers or hot mikes sometimes reveal these arguments to be admirable examples of candor and of dispute resolution-two stressed-out guys trying their best, with fans or bosses breathing down their necks. Kevin Costner’s character in “Bull Durham” doesn’t get ejected when he says that the ump made “a cocksucking call,” but he does when he calls the man himself “a cocksucker.” That’s a no-no. You may scream in an umpire’s face, but you must never touch him. Today, everyone knows that an aggrieved party can kick dirt, but not over the plate, which the umpire maintains with his special brush. Rules of engagement evolved in fits and starts. “Organic debris” wasn’t defined, but one wonders. The first umpires were volunteers who wore top hats, at whom spectators “hurled curses, bottles and all manner of organic and inorganic debris,” according to a paper by the Society for American Baseball Research. The argument between manager and umpire is where the important disputes over its boundaries are litigated. For a hundred and fifty years or so, the strike zone-the imaginary box over home plate, seventeen inches wide, and stretching from the batter’s knees to the middle of his chest-has been the game’s animating force. The heckler, looking embarrassed, replied, “He’s called a good game, I gotta say!”īaseball is a game of waiting and talking. The heckler appeared confused: “Can he overrule it?” ![]() A few minutes later, after a call he disliked, he yelled, “Look at him! How can he even see over the catcher?” A man in a Mets cap nearby pointed up at the device, explaining that the calls were automated. “Move the fucking game along!” he said, after DeJesus announced a ball. Starting in the fifth inning, a lanky middle-aged guy behind home plate started heckling. At one of DeJesus’s games, I observed a kind of Turing test. The pizza-box device is made by a company called TrackMan, founded by two Danish brothers, Klaus and Morten Eldrup-Jørgensen, who created it to train golfers. This summer, I attended some games in Central Islip, New York, home of the Long Island Ducks, to check it out. The eeriest thing about the robo-umpire is the silence. He announced it, and no one in the ballpark said anything. When the first pitch came in, a recorded voice told DeJesus it was a strike. ![]() The contraption looked like a large black pizza box with one glowing green eye it was mounted above the press box. ![]() So DeJesus had his calls fed to him through an earpiece, connected to a modified missile-tracking system. wanted human umpires to announce the calls, as if playacting their former roles. But, for aesthetic and practical reasons, M.L.B. The term “robo-umpire” conjures a little R2-D2 positioned behind the plate, beeping for strikes and booping for balls. Most players refer to it as the “robo-umpire.” Major League Baseball had designed the system and was testing it in the Atlantic League, where DeJesus works. He was born in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to Puerto Rican parents, stands five feet three, and is shaped, in his chest protector, like a fire hydrant he once ejected a player for saying that he suffered from “little-man syndrome.” Two years ago, DeJesus became the first umpire in a regular-season game anywhere to use something called the Automated Ball-Strike System. DeJesus is an umpire in the outer constellations of professional baseball, where he’s been spat on and, once, challenged to a postgame fight in a parking lot. ![]() Grown men wearing tights like to yell terrible things at Fred DeJesus. ![]()
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