69% of baseball fans say they'd rather have a computer vision AI system call balls and strikes than a human umpire.
This season, the MLB gave them one.
For the first time in league history, a human ump's ball-strike call is not final. A Sony computer vision system called Hawk-Eye makes the ruling.
It can read the seam pattern on the ball, measure spin axis, and detect spin decay mid-flight.
Hawk-Eye's Head of Computer Vision Engineering says the pipeline runs "various AI and machine learning models" from camera capture to data output.
On Saturday, one umpire had 6 of 8 challenged calls overturned. Three of those missed by over 2 inches.
The team ran out of challenges by the fourth inning trying to correct him, then the manager got thrown out for arguing a call they couldn't challenge.
An AI computer vision system accurate to a sixth of an inch, sitting next to a human who misses by two.
The crowd cheered for the machine.
