How bad are the umpires?

[Redskins Rick]

MLB is having issues with their umpires, like the NFL is with their refs.

They are both going downhill steadily over the years.

I am sure the NBA and NHL does too, but I watch no NBA, and only the Caps during playoffs.

[survivedc]

4 minutes ago, Redskins Rick said:

MLB is having issues with their umpires, like the NFL is with their refs.

They are both going downhill steadily over the years.

I am sure the NBA and NHL does too, but I watch no NBA, and only the Caps during playoffs.

Not sure if you mean their attitudes/persona is going down hill because the quality of work has certainly gone up. NBA refs for example are required to go over games afterwards and identify mistakes etc and they get over 90% of calls correct.

[Roll Tide]

On 4/8/2019 at 4:08 PM, schittenden said:

I didn't see this posted yet (and feel free to move to the MLB forum if more appropriate), but I thought this analysis of umpire errors on ball-strike calls was really fascinating.  Bottom line, they aren't great.  Even the best umpires get about 1 out of 12 calls wrong.  The worst umpires are closer to 1 out of 7.  Angel Hernandez is awful (as expected), but not as bad as you think.  Joe West is every bit as terrible as you think.

https://www.bu.edu/today/2019/mlb-umpires-strike-zone-accuracy/

There is also a clear bias toward Strike 3 once a batter has three strikes, with error rates ranging from 1-in-5 calls to 1-in-3 calls.

Up-and-in and up-and-away are most likely to result in an erroneous call.

Young umpires tend to be better than old umpires.

A lot of interesting tidbits in the full article.

Let me start by saying I'm mostly a football referee at the high school level. Years ago I did both baseball and girls softball (the later also at a high school level).

i can only imagine how difficult it is to call a 90+ fastball. You have to determine a ball or strike in 4/10s of a second. Then take into account a waving bat, moving base runners and fielders.

Its easy to criticize the job the umpires do. Obviously some are better than others. I believe the statistics about younger umpires being better are spot on. They have youth positives including  better vision, and reaction time.

As for 1 out of 12 , 1 out of 7, etc .... You have to take into account an officials strike zone which obviously varies. Would that pitch be a ball considering his normal tendacies? If so it's not really a mistake. If I have a low strike zone ....I'm not likely to call the high pitch and visa versa.

The NFL has started moving its older officials to the review box, analyst that give an opinion on play by play, and likely on the rules committee to get them off the field.

Just my opinion, but before you criticize.....try doing it at just the JV level. I think that most fans think officiating is an easy job.

 

[weams]

4 hours ago, TonySoprano said:

 

Umpires are awful. 

[weams]

"Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus
Be dull, and boring, and omnipresent
Criticize things you don't know about
Be oblong and have your knees removed"

[Chavez Ravine]

On 7/26/2019 at 2:29 PM, DrungoHazewood said:

I hate challenges.  Why don't you have an ump in the booth watching the game and the tracking, and he just hits a buzzer and radios the head ump when he sees something wrong.  On balls and strikes... give the home plate ump a little key fob kind of thing tied to Trackman.  Two buzzes is a strike, one is a ball.  The ump calls it.  If the robot is clearly wrong, like calling a strike on a pitch 3' outside, the ump calls it right.

 

On 7/26/2019 at 3:08 PM, DrungoHazewood said:

We can sure try to take it out of the umps. 

It was one thing to be in 1975 and say there's no way to tell what the right call really was.  But today?  There's multiple replays and highly accurate tracking systems of every major league play.  You're telling everyone from the fans to the players to the managers to the guy flipping hot dogs that the call was unambiguously wrong and we think that's fine because humans are flawed.  And there's no way we'll let replays and reviews disrupt the flow of a game that has natural pauses every 12 seconds and we also can't be bothered to stop managers from using 11 mid-inning pitching changes a game. 

Making sure calls are wrong seems like a strange place to draw the line and fight for tradition.

I am in favor of having an appointed God who just decides things. They would be a somewhat fickle God in that they would not correct every vaguely ambiguous call in every game. At the same time they would be a just God in that they would prevent outrageous injustices from occurring during the most critical situations.

I am dubious that technology has provided us the truth and that we refuse to use it. According to Baseball Savant, in 2018 48.4% of challenged calls were overturned. That means in the majority of cases, at least two people looking at super slow-mo views from multiple angles came to completely opposite conclusions. For the sake of getting the other 48.4% of calls "correct" we now have to wait for every exciting play to be adjudicated by a bureaucracy before we can decide whether it was actually exciting or not.

[Can_of_corn]

7 minutes ago, Chavez Ravine said:

 

I am in favor of having an appointed God who just decides things. They would be a somewhat fickle God in that they would not correct every vaguely ambiguous call in every game. At the same time they would be a just God in that they would prevent outrageous injustices from occurring during the most critical situations.

 

What's it pay?

[Chavez Ravine]

3 minutes ago, Can_of_corn said:

What's it pay?

That's a conundrum. Do you pay a lot to make sure you get a good God, or do you pay nothing to make sure get an incorruptible idealist?

[DrungoHazewood]

8 hours ago, Chavez Ravine said:

I am dubious that technology has provided us the truth and that we refuse to use it. According to Baseball Savant, in 2018 48.4% of challenged calls were overturned. That means in the majority of cases, at least two people looking at super slow-mo views from multiple angles came to completely opposite conclusions. For the sake of getting the other 48.4% of calls "correct" we now have to wait for every exciting play to be adjudicated by a bureaucracy before we can decide whether it was actually exciting or not.

No, that means that the manager sitting in the dugout, possibly with the inputs of someone who was watching the play in real-time on TV, threw out a challenge in the hopes that he's right.  It's not like the challenging team has several minutes to watch various angles and then wave to the ump.  They're mostly just guessing and hoping they're right.

[DrungoHazewood]

12 hours ago, Roll Tide said:

Let me start by saying I'm mostly a football referee at the high school level. Years ago I did both baseball and girls softball (the later also at a high school level).

i can only imagine how difficult it is to call a 90+ fastball. You have to determine a ball or strike in 4/10s of a second. Then take into account a waving bat, moving base runners and fielders.

Its easy to criticize the job the umpires do. Obviously some are better than others. I believe the statistics about younger umpires being better are spot on. They have youth positives including  better vision, and reaction time.

As for 1 out of 12 , 1 out of 7, etc .... You have to take into account an officials strike zone which obviously varies. Would that pitch be a ball considering his normal tendacies? If so it's not really a mistake. If I have a low strike zone ....I'm not likely to call the high pitch and visa versa.

The NFL has started moving its older officials to the review box, analyst that give an opinion on play by play, and likely on the rules committee to get them off the field.

Just my opinion, but before you criticize.....try doing it at just the JV level. I think that most fans think officiating is an easy job.

 

I'm in favor of electronic aides because I assume that the job is essentially impossible to do otherwise.  Let me rephrase, it's impossible to do and not have a lot of obvious missed calls when the game is televised and tracked by modern cameras and sensors. It's different if the standard is "he looked safe" from the perspective of the parent sitting in the bleachers where there's no real objective way to tell.

[DrungoHazewood]

14 hours ago, Redskins Rick said:

MLB is having issues with their umpires, like the NFL is with their refs.

They are both going downhill steadily over the years.

I am sure the NBA and NHL does too, but I watch no NBA, and only the Caps during playoffs.

I think it's obvious that the umpires of today are both far more accurate and far better behaved than umpires of 20-30 years ago. Angel Hernandez and Joe West would have been better-than-average umps in 1995.

[Can_of_corn]

11 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

I think it's obvious that the umpires of today are both far more accurate and far better behaved than umpires of 20-30 years ago. Angel Hernandez and Joe West would have been better-than-average umps in 1995.

Would have been?  They were both MLB umps in 1995.

[Redskins Rick]

14 hours ago, survivedc said:

Not sure if you mean their attitudes/persona is going down hill because the quality of work has certainly gone up. NBA refs for example are required to go over games afterwards and identify mistakes etc and they get over 90% of calls correct.

I disagree totally, any time, I watch 5 minutes of NBA ball, there are so many non call fouls its crazy. Don't they realize the dribble rule and if you take 3 steps and dont dribble, its traveling. They slam into each other and no foul, yet, somebody barely taps into another player and doesnt impact the play, they call a foul.

One of the reasons, I dont get too much into the NBA is because of this.

[Redskins Rick]

32 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

I think it's obvious that the umpires of today are both far more accurate and far better behaved than umpires of 20-30 years ago. Angel Hernandez and Joe West would have been better-than-average umps in 1995.

I dont agree the quality is more accurate, from what I watch, it sucks beyond my imagination, how the best of the best, which is what is supposed to be in the majors, could be doing such a bad job. Are they too worried about replay, or do they not care, because they can depend on replay?

[Redskins Rick]

Just for fun.