http://m.astros.mlb.com/news/article/239866394/astros-beat-yankees-to-secure-series-win/ In the baseball-reference.com Play Index era (1913-Saturday), there have been 305 instances of a pitcher throwing 100-plus pitches in four innings or fewer. Fiers' became the first pitcher ever to do so without allowing a run.
Great way to finish the series today. I can't say enough about Devo. Even though he has gotten praise, I don't think it has been enough praise. It just isn't possible to speak too highly of the job he's done this year. Yes, I appreciate the sweet offense by many of the folks in the lineup, but there's no need to comment on it, because it already getting a ton of praise.
I really can't stand the Yankees, so I'm really glad that we took this series. All the games were winnable. It's a really fun team.
Well, there's nothing that rare about that. There had to be at least one more pitcher who had gone 100+, unearned, after 4...and the manager elected for them to go ahead and pitch the 5th. Fiers was pulled, which made him the first in a long time.
Is technology not at the point yet where lasers/cameras can determine a ball or strike? tennis is close to that. Preferred system is machines call the balls/strikes but a players can ask a homeplate ump to overrule if they think the machine is off. I feel like we are less than 10 years off from such a point.
I dunno about the ump being off this last game as far as calling balls and strikes. It seemed like every time he made a call on Fiers that the crowd booed because it was called a ball...the TV analysts brought up the strike zone chart showing where the pitches went and the calls were spot on. The ump didn't give Fiers many or any close calls, like when batters were taking close pitches with 2 strikes. Fiers was struggling to hit spots over the plate. I don't know how you blame the ump for that.
Maybe someone here who's worked in a university optics department could comment on the suitability of various technologies for calling balls and strikes - just based on what we see on Statcast and the like, I would think that the tech does exist. Even if its accuracy is not 100%, it would probably be better than the accuracy of human umpires (which is what - 95 or 96%?). The implementation might be something like: At the beginning of the game and at the end of the 3rd and 6th innings, the managers from both teams will come out and inspect the pitch-calling equipment, verify that it's calibrated correctly, etc. They might have a device that throws a test-pitch to verify that the cameras are correctly lined up, or something similar. While the majority of fans today probably prefer to stick with human home plate umpires, with the way that each generation seems to be getting more and more comfortable with computer technology, I would have to imagine that by 2030, electronic calling of balls and strikes will be preferred by the majority of fans and players. It will be looked on as fairer, more objective, etc. By the year 2100, the risk is that the game has devolved into a competition between computer geeks at MIT and Rice University who are building ever-better robot-athletes and fielding teams of them for us to watch. Before long, the 'bots will throw 200 mph fastballs and hit home runs 600 feet or more.
The computerized monitoring of balls/strikes is already in existence in MLB ballparks. They will still always need umpires on the field no matter what (so umpire unions shouldn't fret too much about being possibly "replaced"). It took them decades to adopt replay despite that technology already being available to them.... I expect they'll eventually get this in place too, but like most things in baseball, it takes time. They did a Real Sports segment on this last year... where former player Eric Byrnes is championing for this to take off, and he showed how its being actively used in an independent league that he umpires for (he still calls the balls/strikes depending on what the computer tells him to do).
In modern ball, I guess that might be like the umpire having an I-phone with Gameday on, and looking at the statcast results on each pitch before making his call. I think most fans would not object to the umpire taking a few seconds to consult his phone on close pitches.
The cases of Paulino and other PEDs users make me think of what non-pharmaceutical performance enhancement technologies might become popular over the next quarter century. Paulino is losing something like $250,000 in pay as a result of his mistake, and so if athletes think they can do something to get similar results but in a way that either doesn't violate the rules or is impossible to detect, they'd be likely to try it. One tech that I'm waiting to see if/how it affects baseball is brain electrification. Sounds crazy, I know - I first heard about it from a doctor friend who did trials using something similar on drug addicts. But they found as a side effect of that research that, besides reducing withdrawal symptoms and drug cravings, it also had effects on the brain that could benefit athletes in situations where they have to think and act quickly (hitting, judging how to field a fly ball...). That tech was mentioned in the press recently at http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical...are-electrifying-their-brains-and-you-can-too. And then there is all the stuff relating to prosthetic enhancements of limbs, tendons, muscles, etc. Kind of 'Bionic Man' sort of stuff that started out as research on helping amputees but which might have future applications in sports medicine. Contact lenses are a simple example of a technology which boosts human sensory perception, and contacts are an allowed enhancement to the athlete's body. But how far MLB will want to go with some of the new bionics/prosthetics tech out there, remains to be seen.
