For MLB, Atlanta Braves, Robot Umpires Are Nearly Three Decades Too Late

If you listen closely, all of the Atlanta Braves fans who were around on October 12, 1997 are screaming at the top of their lungs.

Why, why, why?

Why no robot umpires for Game 5 of that National League Championship Series in Miami between the Braves and the Marlins?

Here are two words to keep that screaming among those Braves fans going (and going) with no end in sight: Eric Gregg.

Not only was Gregg rather large at 6-foot-3 and as much as 350 pounds, but he was the home plate umpire during that playoff game. His strike zone that night was often wider than his waist after the combination of breakfast, lunch, dinner and maybe a few snacks between innings or even pitches.

Those were different times.

If you combine the team payrolls listed by Baseball Reference for the 1997 season ($434,230,857), the piggybanks of that MLB era still lacked anything close to the record $12.1 billion in gross revenue that Forbes said the game generated last year.

Forbes also said the average gross revenue per team in 2024 was $378 million, which means baseball now has enough funds lying around its house to entice the majority of the 11 members on its competition committee to do stuff like they did Tuesday.

They voted to push the game further into the 21st century by adding a challenge system in 2026 for balls and strikes.

The Minors Leagues began implementing various forms of challenging balls and strikes in 2021, and for the most part, Triple A players have experienced what is heading to MLB since 2023.

The bottom line: Each team will get two challenges per game. Actually, they’ll have more challenges if they’re successful, and additional ones will come in extra innings depending on this or that.

As for the specifics, pitchers and catchers will be allowed to challenge the accuracy of a ball-strike call by tapping their heads.

That will signal to the universe – as the contested pitch is shown just shy of forever on the stadium video board – that a team believes the home-plate umpire got it wrong, and that for the sake of mankind (or at least for the record books), MLB officials should use this so-called ABS system to get it right.

You know, robot umpires, and they won’t be cheap.

Let’s just say you couldn’t get the following from one of those old Radio Shack stores in the mall: Tons of Jetsons-like technology destined for MLB’s 30 ballparks and others across the country and the world when games are played at neutral sites.

Even so, baseball officials have the will and the money (see above).

All MLB ballparks will have 12 special cameras zoomed into the ball after it leaves the pitcher’s hand. Then those cameras will follow the pitch into a zone with a two-dimensional plane in the middle of the plate that spans its 17 inches.

The margin of error is projected as one-sixth of an inch. The top of the zone will be 53.5% of a player’s height, and the bottom will be 27%.

Sorry for the math, but there is more. When this system was tested in spring training this year, teams were successful 52.2% of the time with their challenges.

Which sort of vindicated the human umpires.

It showed they mostly were accurate.

In fact, if you go by UmpScore, MLB home-plate umpires are correct around 94% of the time on balls and strikes.

Gregg didn’t help that percentage during that Game 5 of the 1997 NLCS between the Braves and the Marlins, with the best-of-seven series tied at 2-2.

The good news for Gregg was that his extra-wide strike zone was equally ridiculous for hitters on both teams. The bad news was that it damaged the Braves way more than Marlins since the worst of his calls came against left-handed hitters.

While the Marlins had three left-handed hitters facing the right arm of Braves Hall of Fame pitcher Greg Maddux, the Braves had six left-handed hitters going against the left-handed arm of the Marlins’ Livan Hernandez.

The longer the game went, the more Gregg’s strike zone expanded.

Hernandez used that extra help from Gregg to throw a complete game. He struck out 15, and he allowed three hits. As a result, the Marlins won 2-1 after the left-handed-hitting Fred McGriff was called out by Gregg on a third strike from Hernandez that almost wasn’t near the Western Hemisphere.

Not surprisingly, Baseball America said The Eric Gregg Game was the third-worst called game by a home-plate umpire between 1975 and 2000.

Whatever the case, the Marlins used that momentum to take Game 6 in Atlanta to reach the World Series, where they defeated Clevleland.

Some of those Braves fans are still screaming since Tuesday’s Robot Umpire Vote by the competition committee, because they’re thinking: With this ABS system instead of Eric Gregg, the Braves would have won that Game 5 in the 1997bNLCS, and then they would have taken Game 6 at home.

As for the Braves facing Cleveland in the 1997 World Series? Been there, done that. In 1995, they won their first world championship as an Atlanta franchise against mostly that same Cleveland bunch.

To hear those screaming Braves fans tell it, their team would have taken the World Series back then two out of three years.

Here’s the flaw with that logic: Gregg wasn’t the home-plate umpire during those other three losses for the Braves in that 1997 NLCS.

The Braves would have dropped those games with or without real umps.