You Just Can’t Get As Mad at Technology As You Can at a Human

Beating a robot to death with a bat just isn’t much fun.

Someone once asked the late, great baseball umpire Ron Luciano whether he thought if, someday, there would be robot umpires automatically calling balls and strikes, He admitted there probably would be, but that it wouldn’t solve the fundamental conflict at the heart of the game, and really at the heart of everything. “If they create a robot umpire that calls every strike exactly, right,” Luciano said, “hitters will never let it survive. Whenever it makes a call against them, they will beat it to death with a bat.” Luciano understood something about human nature. We don’t want there to be an objective truth. We want an objective truth that proves we are right.

On Sunday night, Philadelphia Phillies designated hitter Kyle Schwarber lost his mind after umpire Angel Hernandez (erroneously) called a third strike on him in the ninth inning of an ultimate loss to the Milwaukee Brewers. You really have to see Schwarber’s explosion. It’s the sort you rarely see in sports anymore.