MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL QuesTec System has umpires, players upset

The electronic eye ball-strike evaluation system is now in 13 ballparks.
By GARY PETERSON
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. -- Two outs, bases loaded, 3-2 count, one-run game, bottom of the ninth inning. Hang onto your hats, here's the pitch. It's a big-breaking curve, taken for ...
For ...
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a photo finish. There will be a slight delay while the technician reports to the QuesTec camera locations. Feel free to talk among yourselves while the stadium DJ treats you to a sampling of 25-year-old rock and roll. We'll have a winner for you shortly ...
There is a scourge on the baseball landscape -- Big Brother, the electronic eye, the inhuman element. In 13 ballparks across the major leagues, cameras plot a strike zone to which umpires are expected to conform on at least 90 percent of their calls.
It's called the QuesTec Umpire Evaluation System, and it's driving pitchers, catchers, batters, coaches, managers and umpires -- that pretty much covers the game's on-field personnel as we understand it -- to distraction. Or, in certain cases, to vandalism.
Schilling takes bat to one
One of the stadiums under QuesTec's watchful eye is Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix. Last Saturday, during an unsatisfying outing against San Diego, Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Curt Schilling sought out one of the QuesTec cameras and gave it the kind of frightful beating once reserved for rented mules, the Quarry brothers and Nancy Kerrigan's knee.
Schilling confessed his sin to one of the umpires. Replied the ump: "Do us a favor and break the other one."
The goal with QuesTec, as with the NFL's instant replay, is to get it right. It's an admirable objective, but utterly unattainable. Pitchers and umpires swear the QuesTec strike zone varies from stadium to stadium. Where the system isn't in use, umpires revert to their own subjective strike-and-ball idiosyncrasies.
Which was one of the big problems in the first place. And here the umpires themselves must bear some of the responsibility for the Big Brotherhood that has been visited upon them. As recently as a few years ago, each umpire had "his" zone. Baseball, in the person of Sandy Alderson, called for an end to that mindset.
"It's not your strike zone," Alderson said. "It's in the rule book."
Fair enough. But QuesTec hasn't resolved the problem of the incredible floating strike zone. At least under the old system, pitchers were able to determine the nature of the zone -- high, wide, low, tight, loose, trapezoidal -- by which umpire was behind the plate.
Makes umpires tentative
More to the point, and this is our gripe with NFL's replay, it makes umpires tentative. Knowing they are under the camera's watchful eye, they begin thinking. Which, where baseball is concerned, would qualify as over-thinking. They wonder: Is this a regulation strike? Is it a QuesTec strike? Am I real? Why is there air?
You do that to arbiters of the game, any game, and you diminish their decisive nature. By making them conform to a camera's eye, you also take the human element out of the equation.
"If the system is so good, why not let it call balls and strikes?" Arizona manager Bob Brenly said. "Have a green light on the scoreboard for a strike, and a red light for a ball."
All in favor of that idea, have your android raise its right hand.
Even more to the point, this is another example of the increasingly autocratic nature of major league baseball. It's one thing to encourage umpires to call the strike zone as it is defined in the rule book. It's another to enforce that directive with a robotic eye that is no more or less accurate than the human being who calibrates it.