I am interested in baseball on multiple levels—as a longtime fan, as a parent, and increasingly as a scholar. These concerns often overlap too. Amid ongoing labor negotiations between the MLBPA and MLB ownership—talks that have already delayed Spring Training this February—today The Athletic released an article on potential changes to the catching position. Since one of my sons is a catcher, I had to read it immediately. The basic facts are as follows: over the last two decades, advanced analytics have convinced management, coaches, and players that the catcher’s greatest values lies in his ability to “frame” or “present” pitchers to the home-plate umpire. Thus catchers work tirelessly on how to make borderline pitches look like strikes to the umpire. This is essentially an art, rather than a science:
Indeed, since the home-plate umpire is a human being, who brings a variety of cares and predilections to work (e.g., may be too cold or too hot on a given night, may generally see elevated pitches better than lower ones, and so on), the catcher must tailor his craft to the umpire. “Framing,” then, is a kind of conversation, in which catcher and umpire debate the status of a pitch. “See that? Looks pretty good.” “Nope, it’s down. Bring it up.” Now, according to article linked above, the MLB is taking steps to eliminate this side of the game: during the 2022 season, an ABS (“automated ball and strike system”) will be implemented in various Triple-A ballparks, with the expectation that it will one day be adopted in the Major Leagues. In other words: robots will be calling balls and strikes, making home-plate umpiring and pitch framing meaningless and further diminishing the game’s human element. Of course, for some, this shift will be welcome. As any fan will attest, a bad umpire can adversely influence a game, and presumably the ABS will be much more accurate. And yet, I think it’s worth pondering not only what will be lost but also what automated baseball will become—less of a conversation between catcher and umpire, batter and pitcher, players and fans, and more of a skills competition optimized to serve the wants of customers at a diminished cost.
From Martin Heidegger’s 1954 lecture “The Question Concerning Technology” (Die Frage nach der Technik): “[The technology] that challenges the energies of nature is an expediting, and in two ways. It expedites in that it unlocks and exposes. Yet that expediting is always itself directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense.”
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It's been quite a while since I read Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology," and so my recollections there are rusty. Beginning of last year I read Arendt's "Human Condition," but will need to do so again to really take up and learn. Anyway, I do think that the Heideggerean sense of *challenging* nature gets recapitulated in important ways in "Human Condition." Where I think it goes there is in Arendt's articulation of "world alienation," the lack of a common world. "For whatever we do today in physics - whether we release energy processes that ordinarily go on only in the sun, or attempt to initiate in a test tube the processes of cosmic evolution ... we always handle nature from a point in the universe outside the earth, Without actually standing where Archimedes wished to stand, still bound to the earth through the human condition, we have found a way to act on the earth ... as though we dispose of it from outside... And even at the risk of endangering the natural life process we expose the earth to universal, cosmic forces alien to nature's household." --- That to me is connected to the kind of Heideggerean discourse that your quote gives us. As for baseball... yeah, since I've come to the US and married an avid cardinal fan, I've learned a lot more about it. :D