Blissfully Ignorant

With that title, I bet you thought this was going to be an Obama post. Well, you'd be wrong...this is a post about umpiring in baseball. The playoffs are upon us, and once again, the umpires are getting way too much attention for their bad calls. So far, one could argue that 3 playoff games have been decided by screwed up calls by the different umpires.

The one case I saw was during the Twins/Yankees series, and is discussed in this story from Yahoo Sports. Basically there was an obvious strike that the home plate umpire called a ball. The batter should have been out. Instead, on the next pitch Lance Berkman of the Yankees hit what ended up being the game winning double. The Twins are getting used to this from the umpires these days (a similar bad call cost them a game last year in the playoffs against the Yankees).

From the Twins/Yankees game, using technology that is readily available to all, Yahoo Sports determined that there were 31 incorrect calls made on balls and strikes by the home plate umpire. Let's assume that the batters don't swing that often and the umpire is forced to make a judgement call on balls and strikes 200 times in a game (that's probably really high, but it makes the math easy). That means that this particular umpire is wrong 15.5% of the time, or to equate that to grading, he gets a low B. The postseason is supposed to use baseball's best umpires...are you telling me that the best guys are only getting the equivalent of a low B? Ridiculous!

The technology for instant replay is available. The TV audience knows right away whether or not a call is right or wrong. Baseball owes it to the fans and the teams to get the calls right. All they need is a 5th umpire in a booth somewhere reviewing each play. The data is available nearly real time and wouldn't affect the flow of the game. There is so much standing around in baseball anyway, that there would be plenty of time most games to reverse bad calls. Until baseball makes this change, its umpires will continue to be a big part of the story, and that's not what any of us want.