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EPISODE · May 23, 2026 · 7 MIN

What Baseball Taught Us About Automating Judgment

from VARIANCE · host Pritul Patel

MLB spent 7 years running a real-world experiment to automate the strike zone — and it nearly broke baseball. In this episode, we dig into what a Cornell research team found when they traced every design decision in the Automated Ball-Strike System: the strike zone was never what the rulebook said. What looks like a simple binary rule turned out to be 150 years of accumulated human judgment — and no sensor could measure that. If you build automated decision systems, this story is about you.Paper Reference: Inside Baseball: The Automated Ball-Strike System as an Object Lesson in Technological Rule Enforcement

Episode metadata supplied by the publisher feed · Published May 23, 2026

What this episode covers

MLB spent 7 years running a real-world experiment to automate the strike zone — and it nearly broke baseball. In this episode, we dig into what a Cornell research team found when they traced every design decision in the Automated Ball-Strike System: the strike zone was never what the rulebook said. What looks like a simple binary rule turned out to be 150 years of accumulated human judgment — and no sensor could measure that. If you build automated decision systems, this story is about you. ...

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This episode is 7 minutes long.

When was this VARIANCE episode published?

This episode was published on May 23, 2026.

What is this episode about?

MLB spent 7 years running a real-world experiment to automate the strike zone — and it nearly broke baseball. In this episode, we dig into what a Cornell research team found when they traced every design decision in the Automated Ball-Strike System:...

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