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April 26, 2022

Ángel Hernández Has Blown More Than 2,600 Ball-Strike Calls Since 2015

How many games has Ángel Hernández changed the outcome of with his incompetence? It doesn't have to be in the ninth inning for him to definitively affect the outcome of a game. It might be a blown call that ends a second-inning rally or a blown call that gives a tiring pitcher a boost he needs to end the sixth inning.

If you screwed up at your job 370 times a year for seven years, would you still be employed there? Would you deserve to still be employed there? (It's a good thing Hernández didn't decide years ago to become a surgeon.)

Both Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Umpires Association have no problem with Hernández (and other incompetent umpires like Laz Diaz, C.B. Bucknor, Fieldin Culbreth, etc.) regularly ending rallies when they should not be ended, calling out players who have actually walked or should still be batting, and cheating teams out of well-deserved victories day after day after week after week after month after month after season after season after season.

On April 16, Jeff Nelson missed 27 calls, with one-third of his called strikes (18 of 56) outside the zone.  . . . In a game last September, Hernández blew 27 calls!

Major league umpires blew 34,294 pitch calls in 2018. Fifty-five games that season ended on an incorrect call! 55!
Research results demonstrate that umpires in certain circumstances overwhelmingly favored the pitcher over the batter. For a batter with a two-strike count, umpires were twice as likely to call a true ball a strike (29 percent of the time) than when the count was lower (15 percent). These error rates have declined since 2008 (35.20 percent), but still are too high. During the 2018 season, this two-strike count error rate was 21.50 percent and repeated 2,107 times. The impact of constant miscalls include overinflated pitcher strikeout percentages and suppressed batting averages. Last season, umpires were three times more likely to incorrectly send a batter back to the dugout than to miss a ball-4 walk call (7 percent). Based on the 11 regular seasons worth of data analyzed, almost one-third of batters called out looking at third strikes had good reason to be angry. . . .

Umpires from 2008 through 2018 also exhibited a pronounced and persistent blind spot with a number of incorrect calls at the top of the strike zone. Remarkably, pitches thrown in the top right and left part of the strike zone were called incorrectly 26.99 percent of the time on the right side to 26.78 percent on the left. And while there was marked improvement in umpiring, the incorrect calls around the bottom right strike zone in 2018 was still a mind-boggling 18.25 percent. . . .

The top 10 performing umps averaged 2.7 years of experience. The bottom 10 averaged 20.6 years of experience. . . .

Imagine player and fan experience and what baseball would look like if each year the more than 34,000 incorrect calls vanished.
But incorrect calls have not vanished.  Rob Manfred looks at the video below and thinks, "Well, it's not that bad yet, so everything is perfect." This was the first inning of a Mexican League game in July 2018. The two umpires in the video were suspended by the league for the rest of the season.
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1 comment:

  1. The IngsApril 27, 2022 at 7:30 AM

    Bad plays on the field, bad decisions by managers: both make the game more fun.
    Bad calls by umpires do not.
    Bring on the robots, and make the strike zone a little bigger while you're at it to even things up.

    ReplyDelete