Inside Baseball: The Automated Ball-Strike System as an Object Lesson in Technological Rule Enforcement
Andrea Wen-Yi Wang, Waki Kamino, David Mimno, Karen Levy, Malte F. Jung

TL;DR
This paper examines MLB's seven-year effort to automate ball-strike calls with ABS, revealing the complexities of translating clear rules into technological systems and the importance of stakeholder values.
Contribution
It provides an in-depth case study of ABS implementation, highlighting the sociotechnical challenges and the need for social science approaches in evaluating such systems.
Findings
Seven-year development process of ABS
Distance exists between rule clarity and technological implementation
Stakeholder values influence system design and evaluation
Abstract
Clearly-defined rules are often assumed to be straightforward to automate and evaluate. We challenge this assumption through an in-depth study of Major League Baseball's (MLB) seven-year experimentation with the Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS). ABS is envisioned to call balls and strikes accurately: a seemingly straightforward use of technology to objectively determine the distance between a pitch and the strike zone. Although the strike zone is an area clearly defined in the rulebook, it took MLB seven years to figure out how to automate calling balls and strikes with ABS, showing how even seemingly straightforward rules require a complex translation process to operationalize via technological systems. In this paper, we trace the design decisions that led to the current implementation of ABS. Our case study reveals that "distance" exists even between a clear rule and its…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
