Starting next year, the Automatic Ball-Strike System (ABS) and pitch clock system will be introduced to the first team of professional baseball.
The Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) announced on the 19th that it had decided on the 2024 season to introduce ABS and pitch clock through its 4th board meeting.
ABS is a system in which a ‘robot referee’ judges balls and strikes. Since 2020, the Futures League has been piloting and discussing the timing of introducing the KBO League. The KBO said, “(In the Futures League) ball and strike decisions have become more precise and consistent, and the time for the decision results to be delivered to the referee has been shortened,” adding, “If introduced in the KBO League, fair play will be possible.”
It is a system in which the referee listens to the strike/ball decision through a receiver and makes a call. KBO plans to carefully select hardware that can be most efficiently combined with ABS, introduce it starting from demonstration games in the 2024 season, and implement it uniformly for all pitches in all games throughout the season.안전놀이터
If machines judge balls on a uniform basis, it appears that at least there will be fewer cases of players protesting directly to referees about strike and ball decisions. However, you must be prepared for the possibility of mechanical errors.
The pitch clock is a system that strictly measures pitchers’ pitch intervals. KBO said, “We thoroughly investigated the average pitching intervals of pitchers in the KBO League and also analyzed detailed indicators such as the average number of attempts to check and when the batter was ready to hit. “We are reviewing the content of the pitch clock rules suitable for the KBO League,” he said.