If there's one thing baseball fans are averse to, it's change. Over the MLB's 149-year history, alterations to the game's rules, like lowering the pitcher's mound (1968) or introducing instant replay challenges (2014) came only after years of heated debate between reformers and purists. Maybe the most contentious issue ever to divide these two camps is whether or not to replace notoriously inaccurate human home plate umpires with less fallible machines. Though that was once largely considered out of the bounds of possibility, MLB games officiated by so-called "robot umpires" are now closer to reality than ever before. Starting this week, batters stepping up to the plate during spring training games will have the ability to challenge an umpire's pitch calls and have them immediately reviewed by a computer.

I, for one, will welcome our robot umpire overlords, at least when it comes to calling balls and strikes. The automated strike zone is coming, probably within the next three seasons, and I am here for it. If you've spent any time on Twitter during baseball season, especially the postseason the last few years, you've probably stumbled on fans arguing for #RobotUmpsNow against those who argue for "the human element," two sides of the ongoing debate over whether baseball should move to automated calling of balls and strikes. It came up yet again in the 2019 World Series, when umpire Lance Barksdale missed two obvious calls in Game 5, one of which he openly blamed on Washington catcher Yan Gomes, which led Nationals manager Davey Martinez to yell at Barksdale to "wake up," and another so egregious that the victim, Victor Robles, jumped in anger and tossed his batting gloves after Barksdale called him out on a pitch that never even saw the strike zone. Both calls were bad, and in both cases there was at least the appearance that Barksdale was punishing the Nationals--punishing Gomes for assuming the strike call before it happened, then punishing the whole team later for questioning him in the first place.

D3.js, and the power of the web to visualize the process of training a model to predict balls (blue areas) and strikes (orange areas) from baseball data. As we go, we'll visualize the strike zone the model understands throughout training. You can run this model entirely in the browser by visiting this Observable notebook. Today's professional sports environment is packed with large amounts of data. This data is being applied to all sorts of use cases by teams, hobbyists, and fans.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 25 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com First baseman Ali Sanchez was standing in the on-deck circle so he had a great vantage point of the two-strike breaking ball to Jacob Heyward. It finished so low that by the time it reached the catcher it nearly bounced in the dirt. Sanchez -- like everybody else who was watching this game on a Tuesday night in the Arizona Fall League -- had an immediate mental reaction.

Baseball's future has arrived in the Atlantic League with the introduction an automated strike zone. If the experiment goes well, the days of players imploring umps to schedule an eye exam could soon come to an end.

The Atlantic League, an independent baseball league, announced today that it will use tracking technology to assist umps in calling balls and strikes during the 2019 season in partnership with Major League Baseball. If the experiment goes well, MLB will consider implementing a similarly automated system for its future seasons. The Atlantic League's automated ump assistants will be powered by a radar system from TrackMan. The company uses Doppler technology to track and record the characteristics of a ball while its in motion. TrackMan is no stranger to baseball. According to the company, its technology is already used by MLB Advanced Media for ball tracking in its Statcast system.