The Korean baseball league announced Thursday it will introduce robot umpires and pitch clocks to speed up games and ensure more fairness. The Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) said the automated ball-strike system (ABS), colloquially called robot umpires, will be put in place in 2024. The decision was reached during a board of directors meeting Wednesday, attended by the presidents of 10 KBO clubs .The ABS system uses a tracking system to determine balls and strikes, and relays the call to the home plate umpire through an earpiece. The KBO had first announced plans to bring in ABS in July, though it hadn’t settled on the extra timeframe at the time. The league had been working on improving ABS technology in the Futures League, the KBO’s feeder circuit, since 2020.”The ABS system has accomplished a precision and consistency of ball-strike calls. We have also reduced the time it takes for the calls to be relayed to the umpires,” the KBO said. “By introducing the ABS to the KBO, it will ensure fair play for pitchers and hitters alike.”

The pitch clock will also makes its KBO debut in 2024. The league had initially planned to do a test run in the Futures League next year before implementing it in the KBO. The KBO said it had done “a comprehensive study” of changes brought on by the pitch clock in Major League Baseball (MLB) this year, including the length of games and increase in steals .”We also looked into the time between pitches, the average number of pickoff throws and the time it took for hitters to get ready inside the box,” the league office said. “We have concluded that we would need our own set of rules that would suit the KBO the best. “Starting this year, MLB set a 15-second timer on pitchers with the bases empty, and a 20-second timer with runners aboard. The pitch clock has been credited with shortening games by some 30 minutes to about 2 hours and 30 minutes .Nine-inning KBO games 온라인카지노 averaged 3 hours and 12 minutes this year.