Pith Number

pith:GOIG6ITK

pith:2026:GOIG6ITKBEZIYQ46CIL54PWIQ6

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Inside Baseball: The Automated Ball-Strike System as an Object Lesson in Technological Rule Enforcement

Andrea Wen-Yi Wang, David Mimno, Karen Levy, Malte F. Jung, Waki Kamino

Even a clearly defined rule like the baseball strike zone demands a complex translation process before it can be automated by technology.

arxiv:2605.16237 v1 · 2026-05-15 · cs.CY · cs.HC

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\pithnumber{GOIG6ITKBEZIYQ46CIL54PWIQ6}

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Record completeness

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2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

Although the strike zone is an area clearly defined in the rulebook, it took MLB seven years to figure out how to automate calling balls and strikes with ABS, showing how even seemingly straightforward rules require a complex translation process to operationalize via technological systems.

C2weakest assumption

That the primary sources of implementation difficulty are the historical contestation of ground truth and the need to balance stakeholder values in the existing ecosystem, rather than purely technical measurement challenges or other unexamined factors.

C3one line summary

A qualitative case study of MLB's ABS shows that technological enforcement of rules involves bridging historically contested ground truths and balancing stakeholder ecosystems rather than simple measurement of distance to a formal zone.

References

84 extracted · 84 resolved · 1 Pith anchors

[1] MLB on track to expand robot umps to all Triple-A ballparks.AP News(Jan 2023

[2] Hall, and Michael Nebeling 2019 · doi:10.1145/3290605.3300760

[3] Louise Amoore. 2006. Biometric borders: Governing mobilities in the war on terror.Political Geography25, 3 (March 2006), 336–351. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.02.001 2006 · doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.02.001

[4] Louise Amoore. 2024. The deep border.Political Geography109 (March 2024), 102547. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102547 2024 · doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102547

[5] L. A. Times Archives. 1985. On Close Calls.Los Angeles Times(Oct. 1985). https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-10-22-me- 12377-story.html Section: Sports 1985

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:01:59.464790Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

33906f226a09328c439e1217de3ec88786e1ca31f79cebe4af35bb4541350648

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.16237 · arxiv_version: 2605.16237v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.16237 · pith_short_12: GOIG6ITKBEZI · pith_short_16: GOIG6ITKBEZIYQ46 · pith_short_8: GOIG6ITK

Agent API

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/GOIG6ITKBEZIYQ46CIL54PWIQ6 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 33906f226a09328c439e1217de3ec88786e1ca31f79cebe4af35bb4541350648

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "a025cfa33f398ac3e9ece1c5306ae2546d52a2b0dcc53826cf3cbab2331a278b",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.HC"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CY",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-15T17:45:04Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "c0f1ac46069f75d29f1c8965f940eedb1abc076504c18e2e1070bb076e735309"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.16237",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}