Major League Baseball’s farcical ump show needs to be fixed somehow. The answer may come from the 1930s.
Via: Scott Halleran / Getty Images
"There's no guesswork in calling balls and strikes with this apparatus."
In the summer of 1939, Popular Science peered into the fantastical future of athletics with a story headlined "New Inventions in the Field of Sports." In between the "merry-go-round training machine" for rowers, and a proposal for polo on horses in water — a "thrilling new aquatic sport" — there was a futurist gem: the Electrical Umpire.
A quarter-page illustration detailed the intricate system of light beams comprising the guts of the (entirely fictional) machine. "Electric eyes" several feet to the left and right of each batter would determine whether the ball passed through the strike zone, defined as the area from the upper chest down to the knees. A projector strung along a clothesline 10 feet overhead would shoot light straight down at a mirror under home plate and recognize if the ball passed over the plate, if it had broken the vertical beam of light. When a pitch satisfied those two criteria — in the strike zone and over the plate — an indicator light signaled a strike.
The trippy part of the illustration is the home plate umpire, the very character rendered irrelevant by the contraption, standing in the background, watching idly as his duties are automated by a colorful display of mirrors, lights, and geometry.
Most of the time when you see one of these old-time guesses at the future, it's for a laugh. We don't hovercraft skateboards or commute to work on jetpacks. (Yet.) But the electric umpire, in the form of PITCHf/x tracking, exists, more or less using the same principles that Popular Science suggested. Baseball HAS its flying car — but refuses to use it.