Baseball carries the weight of almost two centuries of tradition. And because it has been around so much longer than any other American team sport, baseball seems to have a particular resistance to innovation. You can already feel the swelling opposition to MLB’s plan to introduce an automated strike zone detection system, which would take away the job of calling balls and strikes from a human being and give it to a machine. This would turn the home plate umpire from one of the most important figures on the field into a passive relayer of information. The only plays he would “call” would be fair/foul balls in the infield and plays at the plate.

Nobody would try to argue that this is not something new, but in one very specific way, it isn’t. We do not know how old the game of baseball is, but it was definitely played for decades or even centuries without called balls and strikes and without an umpire standing behind home plate. See the illustration above from the year 1866. That is the umpire, standing off to the right and wearing a hat and coat.