Recently, a news article about baseball sent me down a rabbit hole of theological and philosophical thought. The article caught my attention because my late father was an avid baseball fan. He spent the last 17 years of his life on full-time disability. The last five or so years of his life he was primarily homebound and could no longer drive. He was also a marvel to modern medicine, and despite the 15 medications he was taking at one time, no one could figure out why my dad spent decades being a night owl, incapable of going to bed before 6:00 am.
All this time on his own at night gave him plenty of time for prayer, philosophical reading, music, and watching baseball. He was a San Francisco Giants fan before he died—having switched away from his own father’s team, the Atlanta Braves. Baseball is a multi-generational pastime in my family. It is something that reminds me of my dad.
The news article caught my attention because it was discussing how Major League Baseball instituted robot umpires in the 2026 season. I immediately texted my friend Kevin Wells, who is an avid baseball fan and former MLB reporter, for his thoughts. He said his whole family had been debating it all season. We were unsettled by it. There is something about the rhythm and dance of baseball that a robotic presence destroys. I would argue that instant replay cameras do the exact same thing.
Why did a simple article about baseball send me contemplating deeper truths and what it means to be human? It is because the more we mechanize everything, including our favorite past times, I am convinced we lose more of our God-given humanity. We have abdicated our relationships to virtual social media networks that require nothing of us and lead us to egotism and self-centeredness.
There is only manufactured and marketed suffering in the virtual world. Everything is digitally crafted by the algorithm to keep us in a constant state of manufactured rage. I have called it rage porn for years. The anger or sorrow that we experience in the face of the world’s suffering is from the safety of our comfortable reading chair or home office on the screen in front of us. It requires very little of us in reality.
Real human relationships require us to look into the eyes of the suffering, to hold their hand, and to sit in the uncomfortable silence and powerlessness of another’s agony and death. Our friends and family don’t need fake digital likes that provide temporary dopamine hits. They need our human presence. Digital relationships let us get off the hook of having to deal with real human beings who have very real needs.
How is this connected to baseball robot umpires? Every time we cede ground to machines, we lose a sense of human presence. At its root, all of it is a grasp at power. We want to control everything. We can even control our relationships because everyone is at the mercy of everyone else. We can shut people off or cancel them with the click of a button. We control our “world” because it is entirely digital. We no longer have to deal with the messiness of actual human relationships and errors. We no longer have to love in the agonizingly difficult manner we are called to as Christians. We no longer have to be crucified. Love is the Cross, but we’ve jettisoned the Cross for the cold counterfeit that is the disincarnate Machine, as Paul Kingsnorth and others call it. We’ve swapped the hard wood of the cross for the hardness of rare earth minerals.
We desire control so much that we have even destroyed our own leisure and past times. Baseball (or any other sport) was created for enjoyment and healthy competition. It requires skill, talent, and a set of rules that are enforced by human beings, in this case, umpires. Control and the desire to win has taken over the initial purpose of the game. We can no longer tolerate fallible human beings making calls. Instead, we “must” grasp at nihilistic—Kevin joked about my use of nihilism in relation to baseball in our text thread—power to dominate others so that we come out on top. We are incapable of tolerating that we might lose because of a bad call. We can no longer tolerate our own humanity or the humanity of others.
Are bad calls all that bad? Maybe in the moment, but they also serve as great stories that last multiple generations and as an opportunity for community to come together. The umpire made a bad call, and he must live with that and so does everyone else. This is one of the beautiful things that makes baseball human. It is good and bad plays that make the game enjoyable.
When the shortstop misses the ball, and the runner makes it to second base, the game is interesting. A human error is what makes that play possible. A pitcher throws strikes and balls. Some of them are well executed, and others are not. That’s a part of what makes the game entertaining. Umpires see those pitches and make calls. Some of the calls are terrible, but they make the game interesting and human. Mistakes and bad calls are a part of all human endeavors.
When we take the humanity out of everything, we end up in a very dangerous place. We become incapable of enjoying the limitations of our fallen humanity, and we start grasping at control and power to the point of controlling and ultimately hurting other people. We lose sight of our humanity and the humanity of others. It would be easy to dismiss my alarmism as extreme since I am talking about baseball, but dangerous situations always arise slowly in the beginning.
It came out recently that scientists are performing chimera studies where they create human neuron cells in order to merge them with various processing technologies. Combining neuron cells is apparently considerably more efficient than the chips required to run AI systems and would require less data centers. Catholics should be absolutely disgusted by this practice. In fact, we have a moral obligation to fight against it.
I’d argue we should be opposed to massive data centers using up incredibly high amounts of natural resources, including our drinking water. I live in the state that has the most data centers in the country. We have somewhere between 300 to 400, with more being built, including a 1 billion dollar Google data center that is attempting to move directly into my area and use the reservoir that houses our drinking water while we are in the middle of a severe drought.
My point is that we live in an age when everything is being dehumanized and mechanized. If we can’t enjoy a baseball game without a robotic umpire to fall back on when we don’t like a call (I’m aware that “robot” is a misnomer), then we are losing sight of true human leisure and how being human means making mistakes. It is not that big of a leap to go from robotic umpire to human neurons firing machines. They are all part of the same broken metaphysical, teleological, and moral framework that is guiding the people implementing artificial intelligence and technology in every facet of our lives.
As Catholics, we have an obligation to slow down and deeply consider each new technology that is being introduced into our lives. We must stop jumping on every bandwagon and waving away small changes as if they are nothing. If we don’t think deeply about what is happening and start pushing back, then we will find ourselves in a dark and dehumanized world that we helped usher in. We will have chosen Barabbas instead of Christ. We should be asking ourselves: Why are we abdicating everything to machines? and What are the consequences of continuing down this path?
My dad didn’t live to see robotic umpires added to Major League Baseball. I know he and I would have had a lengthy philosophical and theological discussion about it. I’m thankful he didn’t live to see it. My father suffered tremendously in his lifetime, and baseball was an opportunity to simply enjoy a game that is fully human. He didn’t like the instant replay challenge system either. We should be embracing our humanity with all our sufferings, faults, disappointments, and imperfections because that is where the Lord can redeem us. He can’t save people that are only concerned with control and power. We won’t let Him.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
