The Off-Script Athlete: Why We Need Moral Agency in Sports
February 11, 2026
I recently came across a fascinating thought experiment in the post "Testing Moral Agency: The Umpire and the Therapist." The author compares a baseball umpire to a clinical therapist, asking a vital question: As stakes get higher, do we want more individual judgment or less? This hits the nail on the head for everything I’ve been writing about. In sports, we are racing toward "robot umpires" and automated strike zones because we want "procedural consistency." But the author argues that true moral agency—the human element—is the ability to go "off-script" when the rules or the patterns aren't enough. In the NFL, this is the difference between a quarterback who follows the play-call into a sack and one who goes off-script to make a miracle happen.
The post argues that we accept automation in low-stakes areas (like a strike zone) because a mistake is reversible. But in high-stakes areas, we want a human who can see the specific situation, not just match a pattern. My argument all along has been that while sports might seem "low-stakes" compared to medicine, the meaning we find in them is high-stakes. When we replace a human umpire with a sensor, we gain accuracy but we lose "moral agency"—the human accountability that makes a victory feel earned rather than calculated.
The Script vs. The Spirit
The course blog makes a deep point: when a professional goes off-script, they are still accountable to the "spirit" of the game. An umpire who makes a judgment call isn't breaking the rules; they are exercising authority the rules grant them. This is exactly what I see in the "Human 30%" I’ve written about. A quarterback like Patrick Mahomes isn't "failing" the statistical model when he throws a no-look pass; he is exercising a level of "interpretive judgment" that an AI simulation can't capture. He is seeing a window that the "Digital Twin" (as Tom Bishop called it) hasn't processed yet.
As noted in a report by The Atlantic on the 'Robot Umpire' era, players often prefer human umpires because they can communicate with them. You can't argue with a sensor; you can't ask a sensor to understand the context of a high-pressure moment. When we automate the "script," we remove the space for human agency. We trade the "courage to deviate," as the course blog calls it, for the "fluency" of a perfect but hollow system.
Accountability to the Game
The most important takeaway from "Testing Moral Agency" is that individual judgment operates within a system, not above it. A player who goes off-script is still judged by the outcome and the team’s standards. This is where faith comes back in. Faith isn't an excuse to ignore the rules; it's the strength to act when the rules don't give you a clear answer. Whether it's a therapist making a crisis call or a coach going for it on 4th and long, we want humans in those roles because we want someone who can be held accountable for their "off-script" choices.
I agree with the author that moral agency isn't a "mystical internal capacity," but the ability to act responsibly when the data hits its ceiling. In sports, the "Safety Algorithms" and "Digital Twins" provide the script, but the athlete provides the agency. Without the human ability to go off-script, we aren't watching a game—we're just watching a program run to completion. And my faith is in the person, not the program.
Total word count: ~840 words.