Chicago Cubs: The electronic strike zone is coming to baseball

Chicago Cubs: Technology always invades

I grew up with William Shatner Star Trek, Jetsons cartoons, Lost in Space and “My Favorite Martian” on the television. Landing a man on the moon had changed our world and the future was playing out before our very eyes. As a kid, it was like an “Invasion of the Body Snatcher’s” moment in time, as technology, seemingly overnight, crept into our lives.

I could see it happening around me as I showed up for school one year and there were computers in the class for the first time. Later came printers and then actual color monitors and floppy discs. This was the way of the world now.

That’s the point of this little history lesson: technology always invades.

You never see the world making technological advances and pulling back. It’s always forward. That’s how it works. Most times, technology is moving forward in a positive way and, at other times, not so much.

Let’s take the cell phone as a prime example of technology moving the world forward with both positive and negative impacts. We have all the resources of the world at our disposal in our pocket, but you’d be hard-pressed to go out and not see people looking down at their phones all the time. We’ve moved forward as a society, but we’ve lost out on seeing each other and building relationships because of it.

So it will be with baseball; we will gain but we may also lose when the electronic strike zone really does take effect.