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There’s an old story about the legendary umpire Bill Klem, who spent 37 years behind home plate in baseball’s major leagues. A pitcher winds up and throws, the batter doesn’t swing; Klem remains silent. The batter spins around to ask, “Okay, so what was it, a ball or a strike?” Klem shoots back, “Sonny, it ain’t nothing till I call it.”

As of today, that’s no longer strictly true. Major League Baseball has outfitted each of its stadiums with a dozen high-speed cameras, which use Hawk-Eye tracking to determine where exactly the ball crosses the plate. Once San Francisco Giants starter Logan Webb hurls the opening pitch of the season this evening, players will be able to – for the first time – challenge an umpire’s call of a ball or strike.

Of course, modern technology isn’t foreign to baseball. Instant replay has helped umpires judge home runs since 2008, and in 2014 MLB expanded its use on plays, then gave teams two challenges per game for suspect calls. And plenty of other sports have gone increasingly digital. Soccer has its Video Assistant Referees. The NFL now uses cameras, not chains, to measure first downs. Wimbledon ditched line judges altogether last summer, instead relying on Hawk-Eye to enforce the rules. (The French Open is the last major tennis tournament to resist electronic line-calling, holding out on humans and the hallowed tradition of pointing to scuffs in the dirt.)

But MLB’s new Automated Ball-Strike System – A.B.S. for short, “robot umps” to most – isn’t concerned with where the ball falls on a painted line or metal post. This technology attempts to apply precision to something that’s always been fluid: a baseball player’s strike zone.

How it works

At some point over the course of spring training, every big-league batter toed off his shoes and logged his height between 10 a.m. and noon. (I’ll spare you the whole diurnal variation rabbit hole I fell down, but the upshot is we all shrink a few millimetres throughout the day.) A.B.S. uses that official measurement to calculate a player’s strike zone, with the top of the zone set at 53.5 per cent of his height and the bottom at 27 per cent. A batter’s stance doesn’t factor into the equation – sorry, Davis Schneider – and strikes are called based solely on where the ball crosses home plate’s midpoint, exactly 8.5 inches from the front and the back.

That’s a big departure from MLB’s previous rule book, which treated the strike zone as a cube, measured over home plate from “the hollow beneath the kneecaps” to “the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants.” It’s an equal departure from how umpires generally call balls and strikes. The strike zone tends to expand or narrow based on a bunch of factors, such as the score, the standings, whether it’s a meaningless game that’s starting to drag on, or if the pitcher is struggling and the umpire is feeling especially compassionate that day.

This season, if a player disagrees with a call, he can appeal to the robot ump – but only if he’s the batter, catcher or pitcher, without any encouragement from coaches or teammates, and only if he taps his head for a review within two seconds of the call. Teams have two challenges each game, plus more in extra innings, and successful challenges can be used again. A.B.S. will always get the final word.

What it means

Perhaps not much in the grand scheme of things: It turns out human umpires are pretty good at their jobs. Last year, A.B.S was tested in 13 spring training ballparks, and teams won 52.2 per cent of their 1,182 challenges. During spring training this year, A.B.S. rolled out everywhere and players didn’t fare much better, winning 53 per cent of their 1,844 reviews.

The Blue Jays were, regrettably, last in the majors on challenges issued from the field, barely clearing a 50-per-cent success rate. They might want to keep deferring to the traditional umpires. After all, over the past decade, Toronto starter Kevin Gausman got away with 709 called strikes on pitches that were actually balls. That ties him for the third-highest total in the league.

Max Scherzer, Gausman’s fellow pitcher, conceded last year that he can also push the strike zone – but offered up a more philosophical reason for resisting the robot umps. “Can we just play baseball?” he wondered at Dunedin after his first start as a Blue Jay. “We’re humans. Can we just be judged by humans? Do we really need to disrupt the game?”

U.S. safety investigators are looking into potential overlapping failures after the Air Canada crash at LaGuardia Airport, including staffing problems, fatigue and communication breakdowns. Read