I read this article in the New York Times last week about the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system they now use in baseball. The truth is, I was not aware of this system, nor was I hip to the fact that they've been using it in the minor leagues since 2022.
Evidently, Major League Baseball is giving the ABS a test run during tomorrow's All-Star Game in Atlanta, laying the groundwork to make this a permanent change to the game of baseball.
The ABS has a tracking system that monitors pitch trajectory and location in real time and can translate all that data to determine if a pitch is a Ball or a Strike, and then display it on the scoreboard.
Of course, with the technology come the rule changes that allow for challenges—two per game, per team, for now—so we can all pause the game and decide if the computers and scanners are getting it all correct.
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My career in the sports entertainment industry began with Balls and Strikes, so long ago now that I don't remember the exact year, but it was in the 1980s.
As a teenager, I used to babysit for my neighbor three doors down the block. He had his own small company that had a contract with the City of Denver to operate and maintain the scoreboard system inside Mile High Stadium. The original Mile High Stadium was technically considered a very specialized park within the Denver Parks and Recreation Department, hence the contract with the city.
The guy doing the Balls and Strikes had just been accepted into the Navy, and so there was an opening. My neighbor approached me with a job offer to replace him: Doing the Balls and Strikes for Denver's minor league baseball team for $15 per game. I've never been a sports fan but it sounded like a hell of a fun summer job. I accepted.
The job is officially called the Game In Progress (G.I.P.) Operator. In the 2025 NFL season, I am part of a team of two G.I.P. operators at every home game for the Denver Broncos. A G.I.P. Operator does one basic thing: Display the current status of the game to the scoreboards. You do that by watching the officials all game long. Constantly. At Bronco games, we observe the officials and type in the Down, To Go, Ball On, the score, the quarter, and timeouts.
In baseball, everything revolves around the Balls and Strikes. You also display the outs, score, inning, hits, runs, and errors, and a lot can be calculated for you, like the total score (from the total of each inning's score). But there is—I mean, there was—only one way to display the Balls and Strikes, and that was to watch the home plate umpire.
And so, that was my first-ever job in the sports entertainment industry, right there inside Mile High Stadium, replacing the Navy guy, doing G.I.P. for the local professional AAA baseball team. My neighbor, boss and mentor was Gary T., which differentiated him from the Manager of Mile High Stadium, Gary J. Both Garys would become lifelong friends.
My first day at Mile High Stadium, Gary T. led the way up the stadium ramps to the second-level press box area. The scoreboard control room was at the end of a corridor with press box suites on the left, and to the right, looking over the railing, was the public concourse below.
I met Gary J. the first day. He was the Stadium Manager and was in charge of everything that happened inside Mile High Stadium. For the first order of business, he took me to one of the greatest places I would ever experience: the Media Dining Area.
Gary (J.) introduced me to the self-serve hamburger station with a pair of tongs and hamburgers soaking in a heated pan of broth, followed by buns, lettuce, tomatoes, etc. I was a freshly-minted high school grad walking into a huge stadium, I think the biggest building in the city apart from the airport. It was a bit overwhelming. Gary J.'s words made me smile while he made his own hamburger just ahead of me, showing me the ropes, "You know, what you can do is grab two of those patties and make yourself a double-hamburger."
He also told me I could eat as many hamburgers as I wanted. They had hotdogs too. Sometimes on the weekends they would add a sandwich station; often, there were random surprise dishes. But there were always those hamburgers, my favorite. I had one just about every game I worked, every season, for ten years, and I never got tired of them. (I did make double-hamburgers when I was really hungry.) Potato chips and various sodas too. All free. One of the perks of working in the scoreboard control room was that we got to eat in the same place the media does, and the teams always want to keep the media happy so the food was pretty good. Besides, I never complain about free food.
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Now it was time to go to work: Doing Balls and Strikes.
The scoreboard inside Mile High Stadium at the time was old; it wasn't even in color yet. An old, black and white board that could display game information and video, backed by series of three or four PDP/11-80-Whatever computers, each the size of refrigerator and packing a tiny fraction of the speed and computing power we all carry in our pockets today.
Through the door, past those computers, and down to the front row of the control room was a long office bench running below the wall of windows that provided a view to Mile High Stadium's seating bowl and field. I would look through those windows until the day they chained up the building to begin tearing it down in 2001.
Sitting on the benchtop was the G.I.P. controller panel. Built by Stewart-Warner, the same company that makes gauges for cars, the G.I.P. panel resembled a jumbo-sized cereal box lying on its side; with rounded corners; painted blue; and made of steel. The "cereal box" had some weight to it. The inside housed its electronic and mechanical components, and a cable out the back connected it to wires that ran, eventually, all the way to the scoreboard. Jutting from the top of the G.I.P. control panel, in neatly spaced columns, were rows of black mechanical buttons, each on its own mechanical stalk, with numbers painted in industrial white on the top of each button. When you pushed one button down, the rest of the buttons in that column would pop up so only one button could be pushed down at once. Each button had a footprint slightly larger than a key on a computer keyboard.
One column was for the Balls, and it had five separate buttons running vertically down the panel for the numbers 0-4. The next two columns were Strike and Out, with one less row of black buttons since those only go up to 3. On the left side of the panel were six rolling wheel clickers that rotated through the numbers 0-9, two for the score for each team and two for the inning. The stadium, the control room, and the G.I.P. panel were all used for football as well as baseball so there were also buttons for Down, To Go, Ball On, and more, but I only worked baseball games at that time so I ignored those buttons.
The job is as simple as it is difficult: Literally watch the home plate umpire for every single pitch of the game, and then push the correct button to display the count accurately to the boards. You can't ever miss a pitch. It takes focus and concentration. Of all the jobs I've had over the course of my life, this one probably had the fewest moving parts. Simple. 1) Watch the umpire, 2) Push the button.
So I did.
I watched the home plate umpires for years; stared at them every 15 seconds or so for hours at a time.
Using the index, middle, and ring finger on my right hand, I simultaneously press down all three [0] buttons to clear the count at the beginning of each half-inning. Then my right index finger rests on the Ball [1] button; my right middle and ring fingers are grouped together on the Strike [1] button, waiting for the next pitch. When there are two Strikes, I split my grouped fingers: middle on Strike [3], and my ring finger now on the next Out number. If the umpire calls a strikeout on the next pitch, I press down on both Strike and Out, changing them simultaneously.
What am I watching for? What does the umpire do to indicate a Ball vs. a Strike?
If it's a Ball, the umpire will make no signal. He just stands there. If it's a Strike, the umpire sticks out his right arm. Sometimes they point; sometimes it's a fist. If the batter swings and misses, it's an obvious Strike, but if the pitch is in the strike zone and the batter does not swing, he gets a "called" Strike. Those are tricky for me because I must rely on the umpire to indicate that. I can't see the strike zone from the side, 300 feet away upstairs in a press box. It’s not my call anyway.
The way you excel at doing Balls and Strikes is by getting the calls to the boards as fast as possible while still being accurate. Accuracy is paramount; speed shows your skill. Even though the G.I.P. panel was old, the data on the boards changed instantly when a button was pressed—there was zero delay. Speed is really the only variable at play. But as far as called Strikes, I can only be as fast as the umpire, right?
Well, maybe there's a way I can be even faster.
Umpires are Humans so they have their quirks, like all of us. Some of the umpires liked to be dramatic; liked to put on a show. I began to notice patterns in their movement. When one of these dramatic umpires was down there and the pitcher threw a called strike, the umpire would—in separate movements—straighten up; take a step back; and then thrust his right arm out sideways while also looking in that direction.
I press the next Strike button and the scoreboard changes.
But once I noticed the pattern of an umpire that would dramatically walk back a step, I could actually beat his ass up to the scoreboard. For the rest of the game, once I saw him straighten up and begin to step back:
BAM- I press the next Strike button.
The number would change on the boards before he shot out his right fist, sometimes a full second or two before. Those were some of my favorite games to work because racing the umpire's call to the scoreboards made it fun.
But guess what? I actually, sorta, got in trouble for that—for being too fast. The complaint came from our home team's coaching staff. Evidently, when these umpires with the more dramatic flair would work a game, our coaches would watch the batter as a pitch whizzed over the plate, and then they'd look up to the scoreboard waiting to see if it was a Ball or a Strike. But the numbers didn't change. Because I already had the Strike changed on the board.
They were reluctant to fully admonish me about that because being an accurate speed-demon on the G.I.P. was the best thing you could be, on paper at least. Still, they mentioned the coaching staff's concerns to me. I waited that extra second or two, and let the umpire's arm get fully extended once or twice, but I soon reverted back to just being as fast as I could, and our coaching team just got used to the fast speed of the scoreboard changes.
That summer job led to a career I still have today, though now it's for the Denver Broncos.
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I haven't worked a baseball game in years, but there is something organic about baseball. It takes its time. I know I've complained about how long a baseball game can take. Hell, we even have a series here at Life. And Scoreboards called "Boredom and Baseball." But there's also something pleasant about an event that does not have to take place in 30 seconds or less. It's a chance to slow down and be a relaxed Human for a few hours, and it ends when it ends. How many things can you say that about nowadays.
So even though it may conflict with what I've written in the past, I am against the pitch clock in Major League Baseball. The main reason countdown clocks have been added to the game of baseball is for advertising—to speed up the games so that long baseball games won't spill into the advertising revenue of the next thing that's on TV. Or whatever. It certainly was not to make the game better. How the hell can you have fun with a countdown clock glaring at you. It's one thing I dislike about playing golf: hurry, hurry, hurry, stay on pace, (we need to wring out as many customers per day as possible).
It makes me feel a little queasy to see our national pastime of baseball become regulated, timed, sanitized and digitized for speed, like when your favorite, local, homemade sloppy hamburger place gets sold and then the hamburgers become heated-up frozen patties to squeeze out a few more bucks per sale. But the ones I've seen that do that typically go under in short order because what made them special in the first place was removed.
As far as the ABS system in Major League Baseball, nope. I don't like it at all.
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