Max Scherzer opines on robot umps after first Blue Jays start: ‘Can we just be judged by humans?’

“We’re humans. Can we just be judged by humans?”

 — Max Scherzer on Tuesday, after his first start of spring training.

DUNEDIN, Fla. — Mr. Robot, meet Mr. Scherzer. You two have a lot to talk about.

Historians will always look at Max Scherzer’s outing Tuesday at TD Ballpark as his first spring training start as a member of the Toronto Blue Jays. But all you techies out there know different. What this really was, clearly, was Scherzer’s first big-league start with those robot umps lurking.

It was only a matter of time before those two were formally introduced. It didn’t take long.

On Scherzer’s 11th pitch of the day, Cardinals center fielder Lars Nootbaar took a fastball just off the outside corner. The human ump, Roberto Ortiz, called it a strike. Nootbaar immediately tapped the top of his cap to challenge that call.

The verdict from Mr. Robot — aka the Automatic Ball-Strike (ABS) system, which is being tested this spring by big leaguers for the first time — was … not a strike. 

Uh-oh.

Scherzer shook his head, then went back to work and eventually struck out Nootbaar. So take that, robot fans.

But an inning later, things got more dramatic. With two outs in the second inning, Scherzer broke off a looping curveball to the Cardinals’ JJ Wetherholt that looked to be below the zone and was called a ball by Ortiz. But as we’re learning this spring, all of a sudden, ball-strike decisions are not final.

This time, it was Scherzer tapping his cap to challenge. But once again, robot technology was not on his side — agreeing with the resident human that this pitch was as far below the strike zone as it appeared to the un-robotized eye.

So there you had it. Two innings. Two challenges. Two triumphs for Robot Kind. Zero triumphs for Mad Max.

Alejandro Kirk’s framing is so smooth…

It fooled Max Scherzer. 🤣 pic.twitter.com/GS23roDLUh

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) February 25, 2025

On one hand, it didn’t mean a whole lot. It’s only spring training. It’s only an experiment. And those robots are not coming to a big-league park near you anytime during this regular season.

On the other hand, this wasn’t just some random pitcher tinkering with life on this challenge-system planet. This was Max Scherzer, future Hall of Famer and a man of several opinions he’s been known to express. And … one of those opinions, as anyone who has been around him this spring could tell you, is that he is not a member of the Robot Ump Fan Club.

So if you’re thinking he might have had some thoughts on his first day in Robot World, you’re clearly familiar with his work.

“I’m a little skeptical on this,” Scherzer said. “I get what we’re trying to do here, but I think major-league umpires are really good. They’re really good. So what are we actually changing here? We know there are going to be strikes that are changed to balls, and balls that are changed to strikes.. So we’re going to basically be even. So are we actually going to improve the game? Are the umpires really that bad? I don’t think so.”

He was just getting rolling.

Asked if he was saying that if these challenges are going to wind up being a 50-50 split, then there’s no real net gain, Scherzer had another wave of thoughts to share.

“No,” he said, “I’m paying attention to it. You know, kind of my gut is that it’s going to be 50-50 and you don’t really have a net gain. (But) I’m waiting. We’ll see. But for me, I just think the umpires are really good.”

He then grabbed an imaginary canvas and began painting a picture of how life has always worked with human umpires.

When a pitcher hits his spot and pops the catcher’s glove, human umps reward that, he said — and “you might get a quarter-inch.” But when a pitcher misses a spot with, say, a backup slider, it might tick the strike zone, but human umps know not to reward that miss — “and they call it a ball.”

“That’s kind of how we’ve always played baseball,” Scherzer said. “That’s kind of what looks normal. You know, when you get to this (robot) world, if we’re going to sit there and say it’s a laser zone, then we don’t care about if a pitcher hits his spot or not.”

He’s technically correct about that, of course — but only when a pitch gets challenged. So isn’t there a part of him, he was asked, that just wants the opportunity to challenge and get a pivotal call reversed?

“If we said it was only one challenge in the game, period, maybe that could be,” he said. But in a world where there are multiple challenges, he isn’t so sure about the implications.

“I’m skeptical of it,” Scherzer said. “I get what we’re trying to do, but I’m skeptical of what the results will actually be.”

We noticed!

It’s worth remembering that player feedback is the most significant goal of this whole experiment. And we have a sneaky feeling that MLB will be getting some of that valuable feedback from Scherzer. But when asked if he plans to do a lot of challenging this spring, he had a surprising answer.

“Not really, no,” he replied. “That was a rare occurrence for me, with a curveball down, to actually see if that’s actually a strike or not.”

So this challenge was just a little fact-finding mission, he said, to get a feel for how the robots will call that particular pitch. But then this conversation hit another gear, when Scherzer was informed that a couple of years ago — in an earlier, three-dimensional permutation of the ABS system — that pitch probably would have been called a strike, as opposed to how the same pitch is handled by the current two-dimensional version.

“Wait, I thought it was the whole plate,” Scherzer said. “So now we have to redefine what the strike zone is? You said it was a 3-D zone. Now we’ve got a 2-D zone? Hasn’t it always been a 3-D zone?”

Hoo boy. This was getting way too geeky, but let’s go there. Humans may live in a 3-D world. But ABS has proven to be more technologically accurate by not tracking to see if a pitch ticks a corner of any part of the 3-D strike zone. Instead, in 2-D, it basically measures whether a pitch crosses the zone of an imaginary pane of glass in the middle of the plate.

Scherzer listened to this explanation and laughed.

“We’re going so far down the wormhole,” he said, correctly.

But that didn’t stop him from expressing his biggest frustration of all.

“Can we just play baseball?” he asked. “We’re humans. Can we just be judged by humans? Do we really need to disrupt the game? I think humans are defined by humans.”

Max Scherzer finishes his day with four strikeouts in two innings of work 🔥 pic.twitter.com/FcwZyxmAci

— MLB (@MLB) February 25, 2025

Well, in actual human news, Scherzer spun off two strong innings against the Cardinals, allowing only one hit and striking out four. He’s in excellent health, he said. And he considered this to be just a “normal” spring start in almost every way.

Except for one way, that is. So those robots will have to be on full alert, because whatever the rest of us may think of him, “normal” is not the word Scherzer seems ready to use to describe them.

GO DEEPER

The Blue Jays ponder what might have been — the All-Almost-a-Blue-Jay Team — and what’s ahead

(Photo: Jonathan Dyer / Imagn Images)

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