When the future of Major League Baseball is being discussed, the topic of robot umpires comes up a lot. It seems like everyday we see missed calls on balls and strikes in the MLB that aggravate players, and every time people start calling for robot umps. However, they are being tested out in Triple-A, and things aren't quite as great as they may seem. Cincinnati Reds star Joey Votto spent some time with the Reds Triple-A affiliate, the Louisville Bats, this season as he returned from a shoulder injury, and he was able to experience the robot umpires. Some of the calls Votto saw still caught him off guard.

“So sometimes when I would take a pitch, I’d be like, ‘Yes,’ and it feels like it’s right down the middle,” Votto said according to an article from The Athletic. “And then it would be a ball. And then I would say to myself: ‘Uh-oh, this is not good. This is going to be a handful for pitchers.'”

The reasoning for this is because the top of the strike zone had actually been lowered by two inches to attempt lowering the strikeout rate. Reds star Joey Votto wasn't imagining a thing. This was part of another experiment that was being done by the league.

When robot umps were calling balls and strikes, the strikeout rate did go down, but not by very much. In 2022, without robot umps, the K/9 IP rate was 9.19. In 2023, with robot umps, it was 9.02.

The game of baseball is constantly changing, and in the future, there will likely be robot officials in every sport. However, it sounds like it might be coming a little bit later than most people were expecting.