As the major league baseball offseason gets under way and the free agent class gets most of the attention, there are other big headlines to make.
There have been rumors of robot umpires roaming around the league for a while now, but in 2025 robot umpires will actually be used in spring training.
The addition of robot umpires will ensure that the calls on the field are correct and avoid the many missed or incorrect calls that occur every day with human umpires.
MLB analyst Eric Kratz gave his thoughts on MLB testing robot umpires in spring training in 2025 and possibly implementing it league-wide as early as 2026.
MLB will test robot umpires in spring training and could roll it out league-wide as early as 2026.@ErikKratz31 offers his thoughts… 👇 pic.twitter.com/b7GTcbisy2
— FoulTerritory (@FoulTerritoryTV) November 22, 2024
Kratz points out that some referees are all for the robot judges, and some don’t really care.
MLB has made several changes to the game in recent years, including increasing the pitch clock, making the bases larger and limiting the number of visits teams can make.
With the addition of robot umpires, the game will likely move faster as there will be no reason to dispute any of the calls made on the field.
It will be interesting to see how the test run goes during spring training and to see if we might see robot umpires in the 2026 regular season.
The free agent class is getting a lot of attention this offseason, but robot referees will be another topic that will be talked about more as time goes on.
Robot umpires could be another tactic used by MLB to speed up game times in a season that spans 162 regular season games.
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