Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine Intelligencer, has a piece about umpiring/refereeing that will undoubtedly piss people off. The whole thing is great, but I found this tidbit especially informative.

Take the K-Box, that little superimposed zone behind home plate you see during baseball games. The concept is simple in theory: If the ball lands inside the box, it’s a strike, and if it lands outside the box, it’s a ball. But in practice, all it does is give us something to get mad about. Before the box, if a pitch was close to a strike but called a ball, we could have a moment of frustration, but in the end, all you could do is shrug: It was a close call and it didn’t go our way. But now? Now every pitch the umpire calls differently than the K-Box is infuriating. It’s a little box that exists only to piss you off — to feel as if you have been wronged, little droplets of aggrievement interjected sporadically throughout the otherwise calming sensation of watching a baseball game. This box is particularly galling, because it is in fact not definitive. It’s just a broadcast creation, with whatever network you are watching imposing what it believes the strike zone is on its telecast, regardless of the actual rules. That was proven during this year’s spring training, when MLB, as reported by The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, introduced its Automatic Ball-Strike System (or ABS or “robo umps”), which contrasted with what networks have been showing for years. “The strike-zone box that we display on broadcasts and our app probably is inconsistent with the way we currently do it with the challenge system,” said an MLB executive. The box is just there to piss you off. And the aggrievement it and other technological innovations foster — the illusion that there is a right answer, and that we can find it, and the very real belief from most fans that the only “right” answer is the one that benefits specifically their team — is pervasive.

I did not know this.