Dodgers News: Max Muncy Offers Interesting Perspective on Robo Umpires Debate
The controversy surrounding robotic umpires in Major League Baseball has significantly grown over the first two months of the season. The MLB already made major rule changes heading into this year, and it seems like the next one coming would be a shift to an automated strike zone.
The Los Angeles Dodgers have experienced their fair share of frustrations with bad strike calls this season. They've lost multiple games due to an incorrect strike three call for the final out.
And even more recently, during a game last weekend, Dodgers infielder Max Muncy was ejected for arguing balls and strikes. He was upset about the inconsistency in the calls, striking out on a pitch that was called a ball just one pitch prior.
With all that being said, though, Muncy joined the Foul Territory Show this week, where he was asked about his ejection and a potential shift to robo umps. Somewhat surprisingly, he was not in favor of that change.
"I’ve always been in favor of the umpires," Muncy said. "As frustrating as they can get sometimes, I feel like that’s just the beautiful nature of the game. You have those interactions where the batter’s talking to the umpires, the catcher’s talking to the umpires, you’re both trying to fight, you have the pitcher out there trying to fight for calls. I’ve always felt like that’s a beautiful part of the game that kind of goes unnoticed by a lot of fans is that, there are ways you can win balls and strikes by having certain interactions."
While Muncy acknowledged the frustrations that come with human umpires, he believes that removing them would result in losing an integral part of the game.
"It can get frustrating, but that’s part of the game that I just feel like you’re going to lose when you go to robot umps," Muncy said. "There’s no winning over the umpire. There’s time when there’s a pitcher out there that keeps complaining about a ball or a strike and you kind of look at the umpire and you just drop a, ‘hey, you gonna let him talk to you like that,’ and you get him riled up and all of a sudden now I’ve got a couple more calls coming my way. There’s ways to do it and it’s part of the game and to me it’s part of the fun. Even though sometimes it can get pretty frustrating, but that’s just one of those things where you go to a robot umpire, you lose that all of a sudden."
It's always nice to hear the perspective of a player on a matter like this. And if Muncy feels this way about robo umps, maybe we should pump the brakes a little bit on pushing for this change.
