NEW YORK—Calling the innovation a remarkable step forward in removing fallible judgment from the game, MLB executives announced Friday that they would be attempting to reduce human error with new electronic bat boys. “Until now, MLB has depended on the discernment of 13-year-olds to ferry gear to and from the batter’s box, and the reality is they are susceptible to mistakes,” said MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, noting that the robotic helpers could identify discarded equipment with 99.7% accuracy, and also came preprogrammed with a variety of encouraging phrases like “Good cut!” and “Wait for your pitch—you’ve got this!” to dole out to players during at-bats. “After testing the automatons in Triple-A, we’re ready to deploy them in the Show. Admittedly, there have been a few bugs, like an electronic bat boy’s hydraulic arm launching to retrieve a foul ball at 120 mph and striking a fan, or a couple of instances of bat boys bludgeoning players’ knees while attempting to hand them bats, but our engineers are confident these issues have been corrected. And given the efficiency with which these androids perform their duties, we expect they’ll be able to speed up games by an average of 30 minutes.” Manfred added that teams would still have human bat boys at games, but their role would largely be relegated to carrying off robots that froze up near home plate.
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