Grown men wearing tights like to yell terrible things at Fred DeJesus. DeJesus is an umpire in the outer constellations of professional baseball, where he's been spat on and, once, challenged to a postgame fight in a parking lot. He was born in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to Puerto Rican parents, stands five feet three, and is shaped, in his chest protector, like a fire hydrant; he once ejected a player for saying that he suffered from "little-man syndrome." Two years ago, DeJesus became the first umpire in a regular-season game anywhere to use something called the Automated Ball-Strike System. Most players refer to it as the "robo-umpire."

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.

The Atlantic League, an independent baseball league, is rolling out a new revolutionary rule and will debut robot umpires to start the second half of the season. On Wednesday, during the league's All-Star Game in York, Pennsylvania, robots will call balls and strikes for the first time in a professional game, according to The Washington Post. The league will also allow batters to steal first base -- yes, steal first -- on a pitch not caught cleanly, similar to a dropped third strike. Except, the runner can attempt to reach first during any count. Using robots will still include a human element, however.

FILE - In this May 13, 2018, file photo, MLB umpire Joe West, right, talks with a player in the ninth inning during a baseball game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Washington Nationals in Phoenix. West, who has umpired more than 5,000 big league games, said the 2016 TrackMan computer system test was far from perfect. NEW YORK – Get ready for strikes by robots. Computers will be used for ball/strike calls starting April 25 in the independent Atlantic League, where the distance between home and first will be shortened by 3 inches. The ground between the mound and home plate will lengthen by 2 feet for the second half of the season beginning July 12.

Get ready for strikes by robots. Computers will be used for ball/strike calls starting April 25 in the independent Atlantic League, where the distance between home and first will be shortened by 3 inches. The ground between the mound and home plate will lengthen by 2 feet for the second half of the season beginning July 12. The 60-foot-6-inch distance between the front of the pitching rubber and the back point of home plate has been standard since 1893, but Major League Baseball reached a three-year deal to experiment in the Atlantic League, an eight-team circuit that occasionally produces big leaguers. Infield defensive shifts will be limited.

During its wheeled treks on the Red Planet, NASA's Spirit rover may have encountered a potential signature of past life on Mars, report scientists at Arizona State University (ASU). To help make their case, the researchers have contrasted Spirit's study of "Home Plate" -- a plateau of layered rocks that the robot explored during the early part of its third year on Mars -- with features found within active hot spring/geyser discharge channels at a site in northern Chile called El Tatio. The work has resulted in a provocative paper: "Silica deposits on Mars with features resembling hot spring biosignatures at El Tatio in Chile." As reported online last week in the journal Nature Communications, field work in Chile by the ASU team -- Steven Ruff and Jack Farmer of the university's School of Earth and Space Exploration -- shows that the nodular and digitate silica structures at El Tatio that most closely resemble those on Mars include complex sedimentary structures produced by a combination of biotic and abiotic processes. "Although fully abiotic processes are not ruled out for the Martian silica structures, they satisfy an a priori definition of potential biosignatures," the researchers wrote in the study.

It's been five years since NASA ended the Spirit rover's mission, but now, researchers say the robot may have discovered traces of life during its Mars investigation. A team of geoscientists has discovered that silica deposits from a region on the red planet dubbed'Home Plate' closely resemble those that form in Chilean hot springs at El Tatio. On Earth, these complex finger-like structures arise from a combination of biological and non-biological activity, suggesting a similar process may have taken place on Mars. The researchers compared opaline silica structures found at Home Plate (on left) with those from hot spring discharge channels at El Tatio (on right). The silica deposits on Mars were discovered after Spirit's right front wheel failed in 2007, forcing the robot to drag it across the ground like a plow near Home Plate, an eroded deposit of volcanic ash.