What Baseball Taught Us About Automating Judgment

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