890: Maximal Americanness
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbpeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. When he's in his 20s, news years ago, the publicly started appearing on TV, talking about sports. Talking about something that now is kind of embarrassed about. I was a gas bag on ESPN. Various people did not like me, I think. I just sort of represented this new young person who was vaguely Asian, but also Mexican. I'm Filipino. But I had this take from the very beginning of my time on TV back in 2012, which was, we debate in sports all of the time. How much did the refs blow this? What's the call have been? Who's the hero? Who's the villain? What's right and what's wrong? And I had been arguing forever that robots can solve this, like we have the technology. If you replace the referee or the umpire with a robot, we don't need to waste our time arguing about this dumb shit. And so that became your stance. It became a thing I was known for, was calling for this robot referee revolution. Like the guy won't shut about these robots. He wins his now when he thinks about it. Anyhow, years go on. And then finally, in 2021, I see this story break that, at long last, the most traditional sport in all of America, Major League Baseball, is experimenting with robot umpires in the minor leagues. Minor League teams installed what they called the ABS system, the automated ball strike system. These Hawkeye cameras with optical tracking, they looked out over home plate and saw perfectly whether every pitch was in the strike zone and then told the human umpire who was standing there through an earpiece whether to call it a ball or a strike. And the way it worked in the early versions is that the robots made the call and the human umpire just let the fans and players know what the robot said. Papa got what he always dreamed of, what he always pontificated about. There's no more need to argue about the umpires' calls. No more reason to boo the umpire from the stance. And? Papa, watch those games. It wasn't, it wasn't as good. It wasn't as good because so much of what going to a baseball game is like is you sitting in the stands and effectively using the airspace around you as this sort of pillow you can scream into, releasing whatever it is pent up over the course of your day and your week and frankly your childhood and you're getting to unleash it on, and this is I think a really important part of this, on another person. Papa says that watching the minor league games, knowing that the human umpire was just the messenger for the robot umpire and it's perfect calls of balls and strikes. It felt like the equivalent of talking to a customer service rep that you know isn't a person. It's like I get that you're making human noises, but it's, it's eerie.
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