Cmon Blue!! That ball was outside!! Can we get some help Blue?
Sound familiar? Yep, that’s the sounds of MLB dugouts arguing ball and strikes with umpires. The fact of the matter is, the umpires are getting worse each and every day. Now, being a former player myself, I never argued with any umpire when a call didn’t go my way personally.
I was brought up in the “old school “, where you respected the calls of the baseball police. Either way, these days in the majors, players and managers seem to be more irritated these days with the umpires.
How do we fix this ongoing dilemma? Most experts believe an electronic strike zone is the proper answer.
MLB has made it clear that games are to be sped up as much as possible. They introduced the pitch clock, and it seems to be working by having the pitchers concentrate on the hitter and respective game plans. MLB also introduced the number of catcher visits allowed to the mound.
Six mound visits without making a pitching change per nine innings was implemented this year.
It has reduced quite a bit of “Lag Time”. Getting back to the issue of the unhappy strike zones, if electronic strike zones were implemented, there would be no more umpire stoppage. Team managers as well as pitchers and hitters, would just look up at the scoreboard and see where the previous pitch crossed the plate.
In my opinion, it would speed up the game drastically. MLB players have said it on record that they would welcome the electronic strike zone. The main issue concerning players is the “AfterTalk “ that umpires seem to provoke after a hitter disagrees with balls and strikes. Simply put, players just wanna play ball and move on.
The MLB is fully aware of the ongoing issues of inconsistent strike zones.
The one thing that MLB better understand is that once these electronic strike zones are implemented, player fines will be reduced drastically or completely. A big wave of new generation umpires have pretty much taken over MLB and to be quite frank, they’re not making any friends with the players these days.
Speed up the game, let the game flow, no more arguments over inconsistency. Let’s just “Play Ball”!