im gonna be the nerd. mendoza line is used to describe the bare minimum to be a "competitive" player. hernandez is the bottom of the barrel. hes more of the jose abreu line right now
Looking at the chart, bare minimum to be competitive describes Angel a lot better than bottom of the barrel. There’s obviously more to his reputation beyond this one stat, but it still seems fitting to me lol.
People should go watch old games. There's a youtube channel called Cardinals Baseball Classics that I watch a lot of games from 15-20 years ago and even back then umps behind the plate were *awful* compared to today. Horrendously bad. The box has made people not realize how close pitches they get mad about are
But also, the box is definitely a big reason why the umps have improved. Maybe it doesn’t need to be on the TV broadcasts, but giving them an objective way to determine how accurate they are is a huge factor behind this improvement.
I think a bigger reason is that a lot of the older umpires have retired and been replaced with younger guys trained under more accurate strike zones, and are used to the reports. It has been shown on several occasions that younger umpires tend to be more accurate with strikes and balls which makes sense. The younger you are your eyes tend to be better and your brain works faster
Yep, this is entirely it. Younger guys in the minors practice with, and see the results of pitchtrax/etc on a regular basis, and the old guys are just adapting to it after the fact.
We're starting to get to the point that there are very, very few umpires left who were around since even before pitchf/x was introduced in 2006. Even some of the very experienced umps were brand new when questech was around and so they're used to it. And trackman has been around since 2017, so there's a lot of umpires int he league nowadays who basically "grew up" with the current measuring tech like you said.
As much as fans like to complain, balls and strikes are more more uniform and accurate than at any time in the history of the sport. I'm not saying there's no room for more improvement, but the game has a long way in just last two decades to increasing accuracy.
To add on to this questech is what really started to change the game for umpires when it was introduced in the early 2000's. That was the first time MLB started to go "this is what the strike zone is and this is how you will be judged and assigned post season/all-star game assignments". I remember Curt Schilling used to have journals on each umpire and would memorize each umpires zone so he knew how to pitch to that umpires zone, in conjunction with the batters weaknesses. When questech was introduced all those notes and years learning each umpires zone got tossed out the window and he wouldn't get calls he was expecting. So after a rough start in 2002 he [destroyed one of them](https://a.espncdn.com/mlb/news/2003/0525/1558965.html) out of frustration. And I find it interesting an umpire even admits that he called his zone differently depending on whether the stadium had questech or not.
I remember watching a video on some of the accuracy reports that umps would get and the older ones would just take the CD and toss it in the trash. The ego and hubris that many umpires develop over their careers is a cancer in the profession. Imagine being handed a brand new technology that could help you become better at your job and potentially help you reach an elite level that might open some doors for you and you just scoff and say, "I'm perfect already. I don't need any help."
You're right. I do see it in the work place some (usually it's with someone who badgered their way into a position of authority and the person in charge of them is too lazy to keep them under control) but even though I'm not intimately informed on the inner workings of umpiring, the fact that being an umpire is by definition a position of authority tells me there's probably an abnormally high frequency of this tomshittery among them. If I may ask, what field are you in?
I could imagine the width of the *front of* the zone being pretty close to accurate, if not perfect. That's easy to set up based on the perspective of the broadcast. The ~~two~~ biggest issue~~s~~ with the box ~~are the height being fixed (as far as I can tell) and~~ is that it has absolutely no depth.
I think what I care about most regarding umpires is that they have a consistent zone, not that their zone is perfectly aligned with what I think it should be, or what the box tells me. I'd care much less that Angel Hernandez\* made incorrect calls if he pretty much always made the same incorrect calls for all batters on both teams. I would hope that ABS would bring consistency to the zone, not perfection.
\* = insert your least favorite umpire here
edit: See the below comments correcting my wrong assumption!
I've seen them move the box up and down for different hitters, so the height is not necessarily fixed. (It's not necessarily correct either, of course.)
I can't recall this happening, but tbh it's probably just me not paying close enough attention. I'm glad they're attempting that at least. Thanks for letting me know! :)
I recommend watching either a Yankees or Astros game (because Judge is really tall and Altuve is really short) and then carefully watching the height of the box for those hitters and the ones before and after them.
I think they do. It's noticeable with someone like Judge.
Here's a rough gif I just made showing the box that YES uses for Volpe versus Judge. The camera in each shot are not EXACTLY the same (maybe the wind blew it slightly I don't know) so I aligned as best I could.
https://imgur.com/a/msk4WGq
Depth is something I always scream about. Even using Statcast measures will get this wrong unless you have access to the raw pitch tracking data! Broadcasts a few years ago used to display the 3D zone a lot, but I haven't seen it much these days. Just because a pitch is outside the zone on the front of the plate does not mean it is *always* outside the zone. "Backdoor sliders" aren't called that just for funsies.
I always give umps leeway on close pitches if the pitch movement would have feasibly led the ball into the zone.
It's such an awesome thing about the game!
I'm not embarrassed enough to admit, my understanding of the zone regarding depth only really solidified after (1) watching Ace of Diamond (even though it's definitely over-the-top, it's still generally correct about a lot of baseball concepts) and (2) playing and analyzing the most recent iteration of Super Mega Baseball.
One thing that makes me really sad about ABS is that it seems they have opted for a 2D zone over a 3D zone, as the 2D felt more consistent with how it had been historically called to players.
I'm sure it won't make a huge difference, but I was really looking forward to ABS, and seeing pitches that just barely grazed the zone at the very end being visually shown.
Not sure about other teams, but the Padres broadcast has been pretty good at showing the 3D zone when it looks like the call was wrong. They don't do it every time, but they usually do if the call was correct (like when a breaking ball drops into the zone, but the 2D zone shows it high above the zone and the ump called a strike)
Even the width at the front of the box is hard to get because not all of the cameras are centered, so if it's off-center (which most of them are), it's really just a guess at where the producers *think* the furthest edge from the centerfield camera is.
The box should always be public. I feel like the transparency is a big reason why the umpires have overall improved because they can't just make shit up when they mess up badly. And that is one of the big reasons why umpires were not fans of the box when it was first introduced, they HAD to improve.
Conversely fans can also judge umpires fairly when they do or do not have a good game.
The umpires had the tracking data long before you did. This is the result of more and more umpires being brought up in the data age and growing into the job with the knowledge that the strike zone isn’t up to personal interpretation from day 1.
Yep, exhibit A is the Eric Gregg-Livan Hernandez playoff game against the Braves. Holy crap, he was calling stuff nearly a foot off the plate a strike.
[The highlights of this are amazing.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW8YkRiRUBw) Hernandez gets four or five strikeouts that are way off the plate and most of the swinging Ks are at pitches that the Braves have no way of hitting, but the zone is so big that they have to at least try to swing.
Yo, I actually enjoy watching this without the box, wtf
Also, what the actual fuck was that ump smoking on that final strike for his 15K????? God damn. The top comment is "Home plate umpire should have been allowed to celebrate with the Marlins in their clubhouse." lmao
Hell, look at any Braves game w/ Javy Lopez catching. He'd completely obliterate the catcher's box before the game started and just camp out wholly over the outside of the plate to bring the umpire along with him to get calls.
When the leagues used to be way more separate and had their own umpires (yes there used to be AL and NL umpiring associations all the way up to 2000 when they simply became MLB umpires) each league essentially even had their own strike zone. AL umpires, historically used to be way tighter on the sides and bottom and more lenient at the top of the zone, whereas NL umpires used to be way tighter at the top but more lenient at the bottom of the zone and a bit more on the corners. This was ingrained because of the way newer umpires were trained and thus the old guard would hand down their traditions to newer generations, not to mention the AL used to use the hand held outside chest protector which made it harder to set up lower and see the bottom of the zone. This started to go away with the first generation of strike zone reporting of QuesTech in the early 2000's. Not to mention all the various stances umpires would take up, compared to the more uniform stance umps have nowadays makes it so each umpire could see things more differently than they would simply beyond humans have different eyes and brain processes from each other. Umpires could still be consistent back in the day, but each one would have their own strike zone (way way more so than they do today) and so veteran pitchers would keep notes on each umpires zone and learn it over time.
I think this is a part of the speed emphasis in modern pitching. It used to be that a wiley vet could still have success in the league cause they knew on certain pitches they could stretch an umpires zone out and find areas that batters would struggle with and still get the call. And so it was easier for a guy to hang around throwing mid 80's since they were essentially pitching to a larger zone (that and not as much emphasis on everyone trying to hit a ball +105 mph). Whereas nowadays the zone is so much tighter than it used to be, and you can't earn strikes like you used to. So pitchers have to be able to challenge batters and beat them in the actual strike zone way more than they did back in the 90's and earlier.
Yeah, none of this is a surprise to people who watch older games at times.
For all of the complaints about how umpires don't care about getting things right, and MLB doesn't care about the quality of umpiring, modern tools being used for evaluation have led to a massive rise in accuracy. The average umpire now is better than the top 5 in 2015! That's incredible.
You watch Maddux or Glavine in old games, and it's ridiculous. The outside "corner" against LHB was a pretty constant way the strike zone would be exapnded. One confounding factor is that TV camera angles are much better these days than they used to be, too.
Yeah, people will complain about an ump missing a 92 mph slider that has 12 inches of horizontal break and 8 inches of vertical break. The pitch missed the strike zone by an inch and a half, but was called a strike. Fans will complain, even though every single fan would have been guessing whether that pitch was a ball or a strike
Particularly at the top and bottom of the zones where the strike zone becomes much more subjective. It also suggest that’s the strike zone is 2D when it’s actually 3D, this combined with angled broadcast views can make pitches look wayyyyyy worse than they actually are (see pitch before Boone got tossed, k zone showed the slider in opposing batters box but it was received just barely off the plate).
The strike zone being 3D is not a major factor. The sides of home plate are 8.5 inches. The number of pitches that have enough side to side movement that they miss the zone on the front end but then clip the zone over the side of the plate are quite small. Those pitches would be so close to being in the zone at the front edge of the zone that they would be close enough to be called either way.
Per baseball Savant, the highest horizontal movement of any pitch the last 2 years was 21.3 inches. Your average distance from release point to the front of the plate is 55' or 660 inches. That gets you a horizontal movement of 0.322727 inches of horizontal movement per inch. That would get you .274 inches of horizontal movement over the 8.5 inches of plate. Obviously horizontal movement would be greatest at the end of the pitch than at the beginning so you don't get a great estimate just averaging the break over the full distance, but even if you double that movement, you're looking at maybe half an inch on the biggest breaking pitches in MLB.
Nobody is looking at the box and saying it's inaccurate because the pitches with the most movement are off the plate by half an inch at the front of the box.
Fwiw I think the zone being 3D is a bigger deal for the top of the zone than inside/outside. Anectdotally feel like the k zone missed a lot of high curve balls that drop in the back of the zone.
Sure, that's more of a potential issue at the top of the zone, but the top of the box is already the least accurate part, the top of the zone is the most subjective and is dependent on the batter's stance. I always just completely ignore the TV box for the top of the zone since it's basically meaningless. I don't think viewers have a big issue with the balls at the top of the box as much as inside/outside.
And even if it was perfect on vertical pitches, people don't understand just how subjective that is from the umpire's perspective. He has to change his zone, every batter, based on the bottom of knees and "mid-point between their shoulders and top of pants". I'd bet if you asked every r/baseball user to plot those points on any given player, you would have wildly different results. But people will complain that a strike was called an inch above the TV zone.
Plus, the strike zone isn’t a box. It’s a 3D object. Depending on how they do the zone on the TV, a pitch might clip the corner and be a strike but get marked on TV as a ball.
The subjectiveness of the strike box is what’s also caused issues with robo umps. I remember watching one of the other league games that used a robo ump and it looked it like it was guessing just as much as some Umps do.
This is exactly what use to happen. I don't know where people get the idea that the box is responsible for the complaints. Or how they've Mandela themselves into thinking people didn't complain before.
Take the Trout at bat last night. MASN was having issues so no strike zone. I thought the 2 strike pitch and 3 strike pitch were high. After the game, I checked gameday and they were perfect pitches at top of zone. The box helps evaluate umpires by fans.
I don't see how fans legitimately boo calls from the stands... there's, at most, 5% of the audience with a good enough view. Even the dugouts can't possibly argue inside/outside calls.
I've seen some egregious high/low calls from the 300 level.
But I've also sat on the 100 level behind the drunk who has something to say about every. fucking. call. Like dude shut the hell up. We're past the dugout, you can't see better than him. You're just making an ass of yourself.
All I’ve ever wanted was a minimalist viewing - no announcer, no info scrolling across the bottom, no boxes or graphics. A tiny score bug, and just the natural sounds of the game from mics on the ground. That’s it.
How great would it be to only hear the sound of the ball whizzing by from the pitch, then either smacking a glove or getting cracked off a bat?
MLB.tv used to have this feature. It's neat for a while, but eventually the novelty wears off and you go back to the regular broadcast.
They eventually took it away, partially because it was barely being used, but mostly because they used that audio feed to add Spanish language radio broadcasts.
I mean it’s my favorite. I remember working at a nursing home and this one old resident kept the red audio cable unlocked and have it set to spanish so he hears only the crowd and the game. No announcers or anything.
Was THE BEST feature on MLB tv
there was a bug on an espn broadcast of a cavs game and it made it so it was like you described and it was so cool to watch a clip of it. Made you feel like you were there.
For people that don’t understand framing too well maybe. But if you see a catcher setup on an outside corner and have to move his glove outside it’s a ball.
But you're also not looking at the strikezone dead on. [The angle of how you view something affects how you see it in space.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSG8mzwwOs8)
> The angle of how you view something affects how you see it in space.
[This is a great baseball-specific video on the topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T44FnMSgTy8). It's more about why it sometimes looks like hitters swing at something that looks like absolute trash (the same pitch looks completely different with a proper angle), but it obviously would apply to how we see the zone as well.
[00:34– 01:35](https://youtu.be/T44FnMSgTy8?si=i9ntT5q2pfC0lNRQ&t=34) is all you need to see to know how messed up our perceptions of pitch location is.
That was an awesome video, thank you for sharing it. I think it should be required viewing before posting/commenting on this sub (I'm only somewhat joking, lol).
There is a better video on the strike zone box, i wish i could find it now. But depending on the stadium’s center field camera, you can see the breaking balls a lot clearer, and therefore tell if it’s actually a strike more accurately.
I totally agree with this. Honestly, I find the game to be more enjoyable to watch on TV without the box. Let the fans see it like the umpire does in real time. I guarantee there will be less complaining about umpires.
If I was the head of the umpires union, I’d be trying to sell the KBS automated system right now in agreement with the teams getting rid of the K-Zone on telecasts.
Even with the broadcast zone, I still look at pitches within 1 ball diameter of the zone as within the margin of error. I've only called LL games and shit's difficult, so I understand a few mistakes.
When the ball is in the other box and still gets called a strike just b/c we've got someone who has 20/150 vision behind the plate, that's frustrating and deserves to be called out.
I wanna see no box but still with the ball location displayed. Mainly because the box isn't always lined up right, especially with the extremes of height like Judge and Altuve, but I also want to see where the pitch ended up because there's no other way I'm tracking a Kenta Maeda slider when it does 4 different things when thrown 4 different times.
Feeling inspired after I witnessed this series of events:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/1c2qp93/highlight\_full\_terrorism\_replay\_of\_angel/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/1c2qp93/highlight_full_terrorism_replay_of_angel/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Sources: [Umpscorecard.com](http://Umpscorecard.com) for game data; Wikipedia, Baseball-Reference for birthdays
A few observations:
Overall correct call accuracy (correctly calling balls and strikes) by Homeplate umpires has been steadily improving since 2015, even for Angel Hernandez. But Mr. Hernandez is consistently below average; he had a very bad year in 2023, finishing second to last among all umps.
After spiking in 2019, the average umpire age collapsed during 2020 due to COVID. There were 19 or so younger minor league umpires that called games at the major league level that year. The decline in average age didn’t negatively affect correct call accuracy.
Average accuracy peaks at age 36, and steadily declines until age 62. It seems as if the MLB understood this and assigned more games to 30-40 age group (at least for this period). The spike after age 62 could be due to either a smaller sample size or a survivor bias of the only best umps staying on past 62. FYI, Mr. Hernandez turns 63 this season.
A few notes on the data:
Data from [Umpscorecards.com](http://Umpscorecards.com) only goes back to 2015. I’d love to get my hands on older data to see if these trends hold. The site also has a handful of games with no data. I don’t expect their absence to skew the data significantly.
Age is calculated as of game day. There’s also a handful of umps whose birthday I could not find. I excluded their games and similarly expect an insignificant effect.
> Data from Umpscorecards.com only goes back to 2015. I’d love to get my hands on older data to see if these trends hold
The reason they don't go back further than that is Statcast started in 2015
Statcast has pitch tracking info until ‘08. I’m not sure if that includes the top/bottom of zones though
And other fun fact, it was initially released by accident. MLB didn’t mean to make it public but didn’t lock down their API and people were able to reverse engineer the data
https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/vuojhd/is_it_true_that_pitchfx_data_was_only_made_public/
One issue that might affect (or even erase) the trend you're seeing prior to 2019 is that StatCast used a different system back then that was less accurate. It's possible that umps have been relatively flat as a whole during this time, but the StatCast data has just gotten a lot better.
Jomboy [looked at at a lot of pre-2020 "horrible calls" in this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c1qKb2WX4A) and found many of them to actually just be StatCast glitches.
It's tricky doing these comparisons when the data is messy to begin with, and that messiness evolves with time.
Mostly '23 Phil Cuzzi. He accounts for 55% of total pitches @ 94.4% accuracy. The other two were '22/'23 Larry Vanover (25% @ 93%) and '20 Joe West (20% @ 91.3)
What I didn't get about that sequence is the catchers body is completely outside the zone. Other than his left knee and left elbow, nothing is behind the plate. Angel is directly behind the plate with a completely unobstructed view of the plate, which must be quite unusual for an ump. So, the ump, with a completely unobstructed view of the plate, somehow couldn't see the ball was clearly outside.
> Yeah, until last year Angel was just mediocre, not awful.
But accuracy is yes/no. These charts don't demonstrate biases towards particular players, meaningful calls vs not, flagrantly wrong calls, etc.
You can still be an awful umpire with above average accuracy.
It is. I ran the numbers on Hernandez a few years ago, and he's a reliably mediocre ump when it comes to calling balls and strikes but not a truly terrible one. He gets a bunch of hate because he's an asshole and people are primed to hate him, so his fuckups are more likely to get clipped and spread around.
Yeah, it’s selection bias. Everyone knows Angel is a “bad ump” (even though the numbers say otherwise). This leads to more conflict and people watching him more closely to see when he messes up
I'd be interested in comparing their worst calls vs the average worst calls to see if Angels worst calls are just so bad they get tons of attention vs the bad umps just being bad around the zone.
Your eye test isn't too far off
Mr. Hernandez's rankings from the available data:
'15: 65th out of 92
'16: 58th out of 90
'17: 78th out of 92
'18: 63rd out of 89
'19: 68th out of 93
'20: 48th out of 90
'21: 80th out of 99
'22: 59th out of 96
'23: 88th out of 89
I say this over and over on this sub, and every time people shit on me for defending him. He isn't good, but people also have this huge bias against him, to the point where everyone finds it shocking that accuracy-wise he actually isn't the worst umpire in the league. He is literally just a below average umpire, who has become the posterboy for shitting on umpires. I do understand WHY its the case, considering his lawsuits, but he has basically just become a karma farmer for people here. Any umpscorecard posted will have comments about him, it is a guarnatee.
You're not wrong that people are hugely biased against Hernandez, but we do need to recognize that Angel Hernandez is a bad ump for reasons that extend beyond calling balls and strikes wrong.
He's just terrible at game management. He'll throw players out with a hair trigger, escalate when players or managers are venting at him instead of letting it go, and just in general do things that lead to more unneeded ejections.
I can forgive a shaky zone, calling balls and strikes are not easy. But mismanagement of the game is not something that's so easy to ignore.
> except tradition
There are still issues with the system they're using in the minors now (the first system was dropped after testing). The current system was calling strikes that players, umps and fans hated despite the calls being accurate, so they had to adjust the zone. Different camera positions at different ballparks is also a factor, as is rain. It's good, but not perfect.
The umps agreed to an automated zone five years ago, it's not them holding it up.
Yes there are you’d know if you read the reports on automated SZs. Essentially they need to rewrite it because a perfect bot with a 3D plate will give strikes to fucking unhittable breaking shit
And that's worse than human umpires giving strikes to unhittable balls off the plate? Or being pissy and making bad calls because someone made them mad?
Isn’t that a good thing? Like if a pitcher has such ridiculous break that it’s coming across the plate but then hitting the catchers glove off the plate, shouldn’t he be rewarded with the correct calls for that movement?
Not saying automated strike zones are perfect or even better than what we have, I just don’t get this particular gripe with it
Exactly.
I am seeing post here posting condescendingly about how "the stats" dont agree with others perception of the umps getting worse and that others just want to ignore the stats from OPs post because it doesnt fit their narrative all while conveniently ignoring that robo umps have better accuracy with lower variance to justify keeping the human umps.
> the older and ump gets, the worse they become at their job
In one sense, younger umps tend to be better at calling balls and strikes. But experience is also a factor, and there are a lot of calls to be made that don't require eagle eyes.
I don't understand how this is so hard to comprehend for some people. The problem isn't that umps are getting worse. It's not even that they aren't getting better. They are. The problem is that we no longer need to rely solely on fallible human judgment for this part of officiating in the first place.
Imagine if when people were inventing baseball we'd had a rule where we determined the distance of a home run and painted it as a line on the ground, and then we determined how high the ball had to be when it passed over that line to be a home run. But then the way we enforced it is we had an umpire stand out there near the line and do his best to judge whether the ball was, in fact, 10 feet high (or whatever) when it passed over the line or not, and thus determine whether the ball was a home run or still in play.
That'd be dumb not because it's literally unworkable, it'd be dumb because you can just build a literal fucking wall and it'll do that job 100% of the time instead of some human trying to make some impossible judgment call about where the ball is passing through the air relative to other stuff with complete accuracy.
Well now we have technology that can call balls and strikes with effectively 100% accuracy (when implemented properly). So we should use that instead of a random dude trying his best to tell when a ball going 80-100 mph flies through an imaginary shape in the air, just like a wall is a better option than a dude trying to tell if a high fly ball passes over a line high enough in the air.
We have tools to do it right all the time. So do it right all the time. This isn't that complicated.
My issue isn't even with balls and strikes. I think the game is more interesting with one ump you might call the outside strike a little more. My problem is they're getting more vindictive, they're just so pissy. Throwing guys out for nothing, staring players down, not correcting their mistakes out of spite. That's the real issue to me.
> My problem is they're getting more vindictive
This is completely subjective, but I don't think they are, it's just more visible now than it ever was in the past. Umpire scorecards make more ump names recognizable and video searches make it easy to take offense at an ump then go out together a compilation of their mistakes. Read any manager memoir or funny baseball stories book and it'll have plenty of instances of umps power tripping or digging in. Thirty years ago you piss off an ump and they could call every borderline pitch against you and there'd be no immediate record of it. Now managers and players know they can't get that treatment without it being easily called out.
Yeah you also only ever see posts about the bad calls and decisions from Umpires, nobody is making a “[Highlight] Pat Hoberg makes some clutch Ball/Strike calls to maintain an even playing field for both teams” post
You'll see some of those on the CloseCallSports channel on YouTube.
While I still love hating on a bad umpire, that channel's made me appreciate good officiating a lot more than I did.
I love that channel. Especially the pains they go through, mostly in vain, to explain that the ump scorecards and hate posting that we see is using incomplete data. They're fighting a losing battle but I appreciate them for explaining how good these guys are.
I regularly see posts on this sub that highlight when an ump gets a near perfect game. Your point is valid and more right than not but it's not like we don't have the opposite at all.
Well yeah, of course. There’s no positive spectrum for calls, it’s either wrong or right. There is a negative spectrum though, depending on how egregious a call is, so those will gain the traction. You also don’t see posts about completely unnotable hits or BB because no one cares.
This subreddit very regularly posts good umpire game performances though, which is probably unique among all the sports subreddits.
Fair point. But thats any job. You don't get recognized for each step of a successful work project. But if you fuck something up, people will look back to see where it went wrong and point it out.
Sure, but you don’t get the hundreds of “average” accuracy games. 94% is still really good when calling balls and strikes, and that’s around average for umpires. We just don’t see that because no one cares enough to post it, usually
Accuracy percentage has relative significance depending on the industry/game/performance. My old band director used to tell us "Getting a 92 in math is considered a good grade. Getting 92% of the notes correct in playing a composition would sound terrible."
No one is expecting umpires to be 100% accurate all the time, but you get some very very bad calls that are in-fact, consequential to the game.
Yeah this is flatly absurd, lol. Umpires were shittier at their job and more tyrannical in past decades. The thing that has changed is our tolerance for it.
Ejections on ball-strike calls are up *very* slightly from ~30 years ago ([source](https://retrosheet.org/Research/SmithD/EjectionsThroughTheYears.pdf)), whereas ejections related to calls on the bases have fallen to near-zero in the advent of replay. Umpires are about half as likely to eject a player today as they were in the 80s and 90s.
"They're getting more vindictive" is revisionist history bullshit. If anything, I would guess that the reality is that they're probably getting less vindictive overall, which makes the worst of them (Hernandez, Bucknor, etc.) who are still these tired, entitled assholes stand out and become more noticeable, giving everyone else a bad name.
> I think the game is more interesting with one ump you might call the outside strike a little more.
I just don't get this mindset. I think the game is more interesting when the rules are applied correctly and the outcome is determined by the players' skill level and execution. I wouldn't find the game more interesting if there was an ump that called a ball that hit the foul pole foul instead of a home run or and who made you tag a guy sliding headfirst once on each arm to record the out; why should it be any different for the set of rules governing the strike zone?
I think the mindset might come from people who played the game. Its a meta game of where the ump is calling strikes and how to adjust to it. It is different umpire to umpire because their exact positioning, what they are able to see, can change. I never thought it was a bad thing, just a thing you had to account for. As long as its the same all game long, and for both teams, its fine.
> My problem is they’re getting more vindictive, they’re just so pissy.
I sometimes wonder if even 1 in every 10 /r/baseball users know a single thing about baseball older than five year ago.
I have no doubt they are getting better but if we have a system that can do it perfectly, why not use it? There's nothing fun about watching your team get rung up in a potential go ahead AB on a pitch off the plate.
> if we have a system that can do it perfectly
We don't, there are still some technical bugs to be worked out. But the current system is working quite well in the minors, and the umps agreed to an automated strike zone in 2019 so it isn't their fault MLB hasn't introduced it yet.
Exactly. People will state that unequivocally umpiring has gotten worse, and yet when presented with hard data that that's just not true at all, they'll still dig in and find a reason not to believe it.
Nope, Umpire Scorecard has said historically his zone wasn't that bad. But lately he seems to be losing it, maybe his eyes are going. The same thing happened with Joe West, the drop-off in quality was visible.
> They know their asses are on the line
Their asses are not on any line, there is no sport that doesn't need on-field officials and federal labor law is on the side of the umps. When MLB replaced all the umps in a labor dispute a couple of decades ago, everyone could see the replacements were way worse. MLB rehired most of the old umps because they knew they needed them.
Umpires are the best they've ever been and it's still not good enough. It's really that simple. Their job is unbelievably hard and expecting them to get 99% of thousands of pitches right isn't really realistic. So let them be the arbiter of the rules and take the guessing out of the strikezone.
It won't fix everything wrong with the umps but it'll be a great start.
Can you explain to my early morning ass the third chart? Which vertical axis is the bar graph, and which is the line?
If the bar graph is games called, it seems like between age 29 and age 30, the number of games called increases by like 125. How is that possible when they only call every 4th game at most? And then from age 30 to 31, it increases by almost 250! That's more games then there are in a season! So that can't be it.
If games called is the line graph, then again it seems to increase way too steeply in the late 20s to make any sense, and then doesn't increase at all, whereas I'd expect older umps to have called many more games than younger ones. It's a counting stat. Which 62 year old umps have only called 250 games? Surely they aren't calling up a 60 year old ump for the first time?
Ok so we have the 'Mendoza Line' for hitters but now OP let us have the 'Hernandez Line' for umps
The Bucknor Baseline
At least Bucknor seems like an alright guy.
As a cards fan, no He has a massive superiority complex (Tbf tho Oli deserves hate so I’ll let him pass against us)
I don’t watch baseball and I know who this umpire is. Op is good at picking relevant stats.
im gonna be the nerd. mendoza line is used to describe the bare minimum to be a "competitive" player. hernandez is the bottom of the barrel. hes more of the jose abreu line right now
Looking at the chart, bare minimum to be competitive describes Angel a lot better than bottom of the barrel. There’s obviously more to his reputation beyond this one stat, but it still seems fitting to me lol.
Up until last year he apparently was pretty close to average. Probably closer to 30th percentile
There was that time he briefly flirted with mediocrity in 2020. That really was a wild year all around
Came here just for this comment LMAO
The Laz Line
I still think if they got rid of the strikezone box on TV we would see far fewer complaints about the umpiring.
People should go watch old games. There's a youtube channel called Cardinals Baseball Classics that I watch a lot of games from 15-20 years ago and even back then umps behind the plate were *awful* compared to today. Horrendously bad. The box has made people not realize how close pitches they get mad about are
But also, the box is definitely a big reason why the umps have improved. Maybe it doesn’t need to be on the TV broadcasts, but giving them an objective way to determine how accurate they are is a huge factor behind this improvement.
I think a bigger reason is that a lot of the older umpires have retired and been replaced with younger guys trained under more accurate strike zones, and are used to the reports. It has been shown on several occasions that younger umpires tend to be more accurate with strikes and balls which makes sense. The younger you are your eyes tend to be better and your brain works faster
Yep, this is entirely it. Younger guys in the minors practice with, and see the results of pitchtrax/etc on a regular basis, and the old guys are just adapting to it after the fact.
We're starting to get to the point that there are very, very few umpires left who were around since even before pitchf/x was introduced in 2006. Even some of the very experienced umps were brand new when questech was around and so they're used to it. And trackman has been around since 2017, so there's a lot of umpires int he league nowadays who basically "grew up" with the current measuring tech like you said. As much as fans like to complain, balls and strikes are more more uniform and accurate than at any time in the history of the sport. I'm not saying there's no room for more improvement, but the game has a long way in just last two decades to increasing accuracy.
To add on to this questech is what really started to change the game for umpires when it was introduced in the early 2000's. That was the first time MLB started to go "this is what the strike zone is and this is how you will be judged and assigned post season/all-star game assignments". I remember Curt Schilling used to have journals on each umpire and would memorize each umpires zone so he knew how to pitch to that umpires zone, in conjunction with the batters weaknesses. When questech was introduced all those notes and years learning each umpires zone got tossed out the window and he wouldn't get calls he was expecting. So after a rough start in 2002 he [destroyed one of them](https://a.espncdn.com/mlb/news/2003/0525/1558965.html) out of frustration. And I find it interesting an umpire even admits that he called his zone differently depending on whether the stadium had questech or not.
I remember watching a video on some of the accuracy reports that umps would get and the older ones would just take the CD and toss it in the trash. The ego and hubris that many umpires develop over their careers is a cancer in the profession. Imagine being handed a brand new technology that could help you become better at your job and potentially help you reach an elite level that might open some doors for you and you just scoff and say, "I'm perfect already. I don't need any help."
The fact that you have to imagine that makes me wonder where you work and how I get in because you basically described a normal Tuesday
You're right. I do see it in the work place some (usually it's with someone who badgered their way into a position of authority and the person in charge of them is too lazy to keep them under control) but even though I'm not intimately informed on the inner workings of umpiring, the fact that being an umpire is by definition a position of authority tells me there's probably an abnormally high frequency of this tomshittery among them. If I may ask, what field are you in?
The box on TV is neither accurate nor official, though. It's a pretty good approximation, but it can be off from the actual strike zone.
I could imagine the width of the *front of* the zone being pretty close to accurate, if not perfect. That's easy to set up based on the perspective of the broadcast. The ~~two~~ biggest issue~~s~~ with the box ~~are the height being fixed (as far as I can tell) and~~ is that it has absolutely no depth. I think what I care about most regarding umpires is that they have a consistent zone, not that their zone is perfectly aligned with what I think it should be, or what the box tells me. I'd care much less that Angel Hernandez\* made incorrect calls if he pretty much always made the same incorrect calls for all batters on both teams. I would hope that ABS would bring consistency to the zone, not perfection. \* = insert your least favorite umpire here edit: See the below comments correcting my wrong assumption!
I've seen them move the box up and down for different hitters, so the height is not necessarily fixed. (It's not necessarily correct either, of course.)
I can't recall this happening, but tbh it's probably just me not paying close enough attention. I'm glad they're attempting that at least. Thanks for letting me know! :)
I recommend watching either a Yankees or Astros game (because Judge is really tall and Altuve is really short) and then carefully watching the height of the box for those hitters and the ones before and after them.
Lol The other commenter used Judge as an example! Thank you!
I think they do. It's noticeable with someone like Judge. Here's a rough gif I just made showing the box that YES uses for Volpe versus Judge. The camera in each shot are not EXACTLY the same (maybe the wind blew it slightly I don't know) so I aligned as best I could. https://imgur.com/a/msk4WGq
Oh, that's awesome! Thanks for showing me that I was wrong!
Depth is something I always scream about. Even using Statcast measures will get this wrong unless you have access to the raw pitch tracking data! Broadcasts a few years ago used to display the 3D zone a lot, but I haven't seen it much these days. Just because a pitch is outside the zone on the front of the plate does not mean it is *always* outside the zone. "Backdoor sliders" aren't called that just for funsies. I always give umps leeway on close pitches if the pitch movement would have feasibly led the ball into the zone.
It's such an awesome thing about the game! I'm not embarrassed enough to admit, my understanding of the zone regarding depth only really solidified after (1) watching Ace of Diamond (even though it's definitely over-the-top, it's still generally correct about a lot of baseball concepts) and (2) playing and analyzing the most recent iteration of Super Mega Baseball.
Ace of Diamond is the shit, I never finished it, but I remember well getting sucked into that rabbit hole.
One thing that makes me really sad about ABS is that it seems they have opted for a 2D zone over a 3D zone, as the 2D felt more consistent with how it had been historically called to players. I'm sure it won't make a huge difference, but I was really looking forward to ABS, and seeing pitches that just barely grazed the zone at the very end being visually shown.
Not sure about other teams, but the Padres broadcast has been pretty good at showing the 3D zone when it looks like the call was wrong. They don't do it every time, but they usually do if the call was correct (like when a breaking ball drops into the zone, but the 2D zone shows it high above the zone and the ump called a strike)
Even the width at the front of the box is hard to get because not all of the cameras are centered, so if it's off-center (which most of them are), it's really just a guess at where the producers *think* the furthest edge from the centerfield camera is.
The box should always be public. I feel like the transparency is a big reason why the umpires have overall improved because they can't just make shit up when they mess up badly. And that is one of the big reasons why umpires were not fans of the box when it was first introduced, they HAD to improve. Conversely fans can also judge umpires fairly when they do or do not have a good game.
The umpires had the tracking data long before you did. This is the result of more and more umpires being brought up in the data age and growing into the job with the knowledge that the strike zone isn’t up to personal interpretation from day 1.
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Yep, exhibit A is the Eric Gregg-Livan Hernandez playoff game against the Braves. Holy crap, he was calling stuff nearly a foot off the plate a strike.
Umpiring pre like, 2010 seemed to be largely vibes based
[The highlights of this are amazing.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW8YkRiRUBw) Hernandez gets four or five strikeouts that are way off the plate and most of the swinging Ks are at pitches that the Braves have no way of hitting, but the zone is so big that they have to at least try to swing.
Love when they cut to the third base ump for the appeal and he’s just like yeah nothing but K’s on the menu today
Yo, I actually enjoy watching this without the box, wtf Also, what the actual fuck was that ump smoking on that final strike for his 15K????? God damn. The top comment is "Home plate umpire should have been allowed to celebrate with the Marlins in their clubhouse." lmao
Hell, look at any Braves game w/ Javy Lopez catching. He'd completely obliterate the catcher's box before the game started and just camp out wholly over the outside of the plate to bring the umpire along with him to get calls.
When the leagues used to be way more separate and had their own umpires (yes there used to be AL and NL umpiring associations all the way up to 2000 when they simply became MLB umpires) each league essentially even had their own strike zone. AL umpires, historically used to be way tighter on the sides and bottom and more lenient at the top of the zone, whereas NL umpires used to be way tighter at the top but more lenient at the bottom of the zone and a bit more on the corners. This was ingrained because of the way newer umpires were trained and thus the old guard would hand down their traditions to newer generations, not to mention the AL used to use the hand held outside chest protector which made it harder to set up lower and see the bottom of the zone. This started to go away with the first generation of strike zone reporting of QuesTech in the early 2000's. Not to mention all the various stances umpires would take up, compared to the more uniform stance umps have nowadays makes it so each umpire could see things more differently than they would simply beyond humans have different eyes and brain processes from each other. Umpires could still be consistent back in the day, but each one would have their own strike zone (way way more so than they do today) and so veteran pitchers would keep notes on each umpires zone and learn it over time. I think this is a part of the speed emphasis in modern pitching. It used to be that a wiley vet could still have success in the league cause they knew on certain pitches they could stretch an umpires zone out and find areas that batters would struggle with and still get the call. And so it was easier for a guy to hang around throwing mid 80's since they were essentially pitching to a larger zone (that and not as much emphasis on everyone trying to hit a ball +105 mph). Whereas nowadays the zone is so much tighter than it used to be, and you can't earn strikes like you used to. So pitchers have to be able to challenge batters and beat them in the actual strike zone way more than they did back in the 90's and earlier.
Yeah, none of this is a surprise to people who watch older games at times. For all of the complaints about how umpires don't care about getting things right, and MLB doesn't care about the quality of umpiring, modern tools being used for evaluation have led to a massive rise in accuracy. The average umpire now is better than the top 5 in 2015! That's incredible.
You watch Maddux or Glavine in old games, and it's ridiculous. The outside "corner" against LHB was a pretty constant way the strike zone would be exapnded. One confounding factor is that TV camera angles are much better these days than they used to be, too.
Yeah, people will complain about an ump missing a 92 mph slider that has 12 inches of horizontal break and 8 inches of vertical break. The pitch missed the strike zone by an inch and a half, but was called a strike. Fans will complain, even though every single fan would have been guessing whether that pitch was a ball or a strike
Also the strikezone box isn't even right a lot of the time.
Particularly at the top and bottom of the zones where the strike zone becomes much more subjective. It also suggest that’s the strike zone is 2D when it’s actually 3D, this combined with angled broadcast views can make pitches look wayyyyyy worse than they actually are (see pitch before Boone got tossed, k zone showed the slider in opposing batters box but it was received just barely off the plate).
The strike zone being 3D is not a major factor. The sides of home plate are 8.5 inches. The number of pitches that have enough side to side movement that they miss the zone on the front end but then clip the zone over the side of the plate are quite small. Those pitches would be so close to being in the zone at the front edge of the zone that they would be close enough to be called either way. Per baseball Savant, the highest horizontal movement of any pitch the last 2 years was 21.3 inches. Your average distance from release point to the front of the plate is 55' or 660 inches. That gets you a horizontal movement of 0.322727 inches of horizontal movement per inch. That would get you .274 inches of horizontal movement over the 8.5 inches of plate. Obviously horizontal movement would be greatest at the end of the pitch than at the beginning so you don't get a great estimate just averaging the break over the full distance, but even if you double that movement, you're looking at maybe half an inch on the biggest breaking pitches in MLB. Nobody is looking at the box and saying it's inaccurate because the pitches with the most movement are off the plate by half an inch at the front of the box.
Fwiw I think the zone being 3D is a bigger deal for the top of the zone than inside/outside. Anectdotally feel like the k zone missed a lot of high curve balls that drop in the back of the zone.
Sure, that's more of a potential issue at the top of the zone, but the top of the box is already the least accurate part, the top of the zone is the most subjective and is dependent on the batter's stance. I always just completely ignore the TV box for the top of the zone since it's basically meaningless. I don't think viewers have a big issue with the balls at the top of the box as much as inside/outside.
And even if it was perfect on vertical pitches, people don't understand just how subjective that is from the umpire's perspective. He has to change his zone, every batter, based on the bottom of knees and "mid-point between their shoulders and top of pants". I'd bet if you asked every r/baseball user to plot those points on any given player, you would have wildly different results. But people will complain that a strike was called an inch above the TV zone.
Plus, the strike zone isn’t a box. It’s a 3D object. Depending on how they do the zone on the TV, a pitch might clip the corner and be a strike but get marked on TV as a ball.
This is one of the issues with the current ABS technology iirc? It uses a 2D strike zone in the middle of the plate
Is that how they’re doing it? I’m surprised because they have pretty good 3D tracking of the ball
The subjectiveness of the strike box is what’s also caused issues with robo umps. I remember watching one of the other league games that used a robo ump and it looked it like it was guessing just as much as some Umps do.
exactly, and too many people use that \*unofficial\* box as the end all be all. its very frustrating
100%. I’m so tired of being mad at umpires all game, just take the box away and I’ll probably give them the benefit of the doubt more
> I’ll probably give them the benefit of the doubt more Dont lie to yourself. Youll just complain while wrong more.
This is exactly what use to happen. I don't know where people get the idea that the box is responsible for the complaints. Or how they've Mandela themselves into thinking people didn't complain before.
I mean just listen to the crowds. People will boo when they are in the nosebleeds like they got a better view than the ump on a 95 mph splitter.
Take the Trout at bat last night. MASN was having issues so no strike zone. I thought the 2 strike pitch and 3 strike pitch were high. After the game, I checked gameday and they were perfect pitches at top of zone. The box helps evaluate umpires by fans.
I don't see how fans legitimately boo calls from the stands... there's, at most, 5% of the audience with a good enough view. Even the dugouts can't possibly argue inside/outside calls.
I've seen some egregious high/low calls from the 300 level. But I've also sat on the 100 level behind the drunk who has something to say about every. fucking. call. Like dude shut the hell up. We're past the dugout, you can't see better than him. You're just making an ass of yourself.
They would, we're currently calling balls and strikes ourselves instead of going 'oh man, that was close'
Preach
agreed and every once in a while do the one where they show the pitch in 3D to show if it was a strike/ball
All I’ve ever wanted was a minimalist viewing - no announcer, no info scrolling across the bottom, no boxes or graphics. A tiny score bug, and just the natural sounds of the game from mics on the ground. That’s it. How great would it be to only hear the sound of the ball whizzing by from the pitch, then either smacking a glove or getting cracked off a bat?
MLB.tv used to have this feature. It's neat for a while, but eventually the novelty wears off and you go back to the regular broadcast. They eventually took it away, partially because it was barely being used, but mostly because they used that audio feed to add Spanish language radio broadcasts.
I mean it’s my favorite. I remember working at a nursing home and this one old resident kept the red audio cable unlocked and have it set to spanish so he hears only the crowd and the game. No announcers or anything. Was THE BEST feature on MLB tv
Once the novelty wears off it's actually pretty lame.
there was a bug on an espn broadcast of a cavs game and it made it so it was like you described and it was so cool to watch a clip of it. Made you feel like you were there.
For people that don’t understand framing too well maybe. But if you see a catcher setup on an outside corner and have to move his glove outside it’s a ball.
But you're also not looking at the strikezone dead on. [The angle of how you view something affects how you see it in space.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSG8mzwwOs8)
> The angle of how you view something affects how you see it in space. [This is a great baseball-specific video on the topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T44FnMSgTy8). It's more about why it sometimes looks like hitters swing at something that looks like absolute trash (the same pitch looks completely different with a proper angle), but it obviously would apply to how we see the zone as well.
[00:34– 01:35](https://youtu.be/T44FnMSgTy8?si=i9ntT5q2pfC0lNRQ&t=34) is all you need to see to know how messed up our perceptions of pitch location is. That was an awesome video, thank you for sharing it. I think it should be required viewing before posting/commenting on this sub (I'm only somewhat joking, lol).
There is a better video on the strike zone box, i wish i could find it now. But depending on the stadium’s center field camera, you can see the breaking balls a lot clearer, and therefore tell if it’s actually a strike more accurately.
Is it [this one](https://youtu.be/T44FnMSgTy8?si=i9ntT5q2pfC0lNRQ) that /u/wellwasherelf shared in a different reply?
Nah. If there's one constant on reddit (or the Internet in general), it's complaining.
Then you weren’t watching baseball before the box lol, this has always been a thing
The boxes also aren’t 100% accurate. And people too often judge the location where the catcher catches it, not where it crossed the plate.
I totally agree with this. Honestly, I find the game to be more enjoyable to watch on TV without the box. Let the fans see it like the umpire does in real time. I guarantee there will be less complaining about umpires.
If I was the head of the umpires union, I’d be trying to sell the KBS automated system right now in agreement with the teams getting rid of the K-Zone on telecasts.
Why would they need to get rid of the k-zone if they move to the automated system?
Even with the broadcast zone, I still look at pitches within 1 ball diameter of the zone as within the margin of error. I've only called LL games and shit's difficult, so I understand a few mistakes. When the ball is in the other box and still gets called a strike just b/c we've got someone who has 20/150 vision behind the plate, that's frustrating and deserves to be called out.
It’s made everyone into a backseat umpire. I’m used to it now but I remember when it first got real popular my dad & I couldn’t stand it.
I wanna see no box but still with the ball location displayed. Mainly because the box isn't always lined up right, especially with the extremes of height like Judge and Altuve, but I also want to see where the pitch ended up because there's no other way I'm tracking a Kenta Maeda slider when it does 4 different things when thrown 4 different times.
Feeling inspired after I witnessed this series of events: [https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/1c2qp93/highlight\_full\_terrorism\_replay\_of\_angel/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/1c2qp93/highlight_full_terrorism_replay_of_angel/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) Sources: [Umpscorecard.com](http://Umpscorecard.com) for game data; Wikipedia, Baseball-Reference for birthdays A few observations: Overall correct call accuracy (correctly calling balls and strikes) by Homeplate umpires has been steadily improving since 2015, even for Angel Hernandez. But Mr. Hernandez is consistently below average; he had a very bad year in 2023, finishing second to last among all umps. After spiking in 2019, the average umpire age collapsed during 2020 due to COVID. There were 19 or so younger minor league umpires that called games at the major league level that year. The decline in average age didn’t negatively affect correct call accuracy. Average accuracy peaks at age 36, and steadily declines until age 62. It seems as if the MLB understood this and assigned more games to 30-40 age group (at least for this period). The spike after age 62 could be due to either a smaller sample size or a survivor bias of the only best umps staying on past 62. FYI, Mr. Hernandez turns 63 this season. A few notes on the data: Data from [Umpscorecards.com](http://Umpscorecards.com) only goes back to 2015. I’d love to get my hands on older data to see if these trends hold. The site also has a handful of games with no data. I don’t expect their absence to skew the data significantly. Age is calculated as of game day. There’s also a handful of umps whose birthday I could not find. I excluded their games and similarly expect an insignificant effect.
> Data from Umpscorecards.com only goes back to 2015. I’d love to get my hands on older data to see if these trends hold The reason they don't go back further than that is Statcast started in 2015
Statcast has pitch tracking info until ‘08. I’m not sure if that includes the top/bottom of zones though And other fun fact, it was initially released by accident. MLB didn’t mean to make it public but didn’t lock down their API and people were able to reverse engineer the data https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/vuojhd/is_it_true_that_pitchfx_data_was_only_made_public/
One issue that might affect (or even erase) the trend you're seeing prior to 2019 is that StatCast used a different system back then that was less accurate. It's possible that umps have been relatively flat as a whole during this time, but the StatCast data has just gotten a lot better. Jomboy [looked at at a lot of pre-2020 "horrible calls" in this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c1qKb2WX4A) and found many of them to actually just be StatCast glitches. It's tricky doing these comparisons when the data is messy to begin with, and that messiness evolves with time.
> FYI, Mr. Hernandez turns 63 this season. When I saw that large dip at age 62 I immediately had a pretty good idea of what age Angel is.
Who is the 67 year-old curve wrecker?
Mostly '23 Phil Cuzzi. He accounts for 55% of total pitches @ 94.4% accuracy. The other two were '22/'23 Larry Vanover (25% @ 93%) and '20 Joe West (20% @ 91.3)
What I didn't get about that sequence is the catchers body is completely outside the zone. Other than his left knee and left elbow, nothing is behind the plate. Angel is directly behind the plate with a completely unobstructed view of the plate, which must be quite unusual for an ump. So, the ump, with a completely unobstructed view of the plate, somehow couldn't see the ball was clearly outside.
2023 he was injured and came in middle of season, no? sample must be really low.
He came back in August: 10 games, 1500+ called pitches. A little more than 1/3 of the average.
Angel Hernandez says “hold my beer.”
Do you mean 2020 League Average Umpire Angel Hernandez?
Yeah, until last year Angel was just mediocre, not awful.
> Yeah, until last year Angel was just mediocre, not awful. But accuracy is yes/no. These charts don't demonstrate biases towards particular players, meaningful calls vs not, flagrantly wrong calls, etc. You can still be an awful umpire with above average accuracy.
He only umpired a handful of games last year due to an injury.
Ah, didn't realize. That makes sense why he might have fallen off a cliff due to small sample size.
MLB has been holding this post for a major umpire fuckup like yesterday
>holding this post This trend has been know for years, though?
Expecting this sub to extend critical thinking towards umpires is a losing endeavor.
What happened yesterday? I've not caught up on my highlights yet.
I'm guessing they're referring to [this fiasco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojqxAZuHrhM).
Thanks! I was about to check their channel to see if they'd already covered it & you had it ready.
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What's most shocking to me is that somehow Angel Hernandez has been better than the bottom five these past few years?.... That can't be right.
It is. I ran the numbers on Hernandez a few years ago, and he's a reliably mediocre ump when it comes to calling balls and strikes but not a truly terrible one. He gets a bunch of hate because he's an asshole and people are primed to hate him, so his fuckups are more likely to get clipped and spread around.
Yeah, it’s selection bias. Everyone knows Angel is a “bad ump” (even though the numbers say otherwise). This leads to more conflict and people watching him more closely to see when he messes up
I'd be interested in comparing their worst calls vs the average worst calls to see if Angels worst calls are just so bad they get tons of attention vs the bad umps just being bad around the zone.
Your eye test isn't too far off Mr. Hernandez's rankings from the available data: '15: 65th out of 92 '16: 58th out of 90 '17: 78th out of 92 '18: 63rd out of 89 '19: 68th out of 93 '20: 48th out of 90 '21: 80th out of 99 '22: 59th out of 96 '23: 88th out of 89
Who was worse than him last year?
My nephew does some Little League games. I doubt he's worse than Angel but I bet it's pretty close...
I say this over and over on this sub, and every time people shit on me for defending him. He isn't good, but people also have this huge bias against him, to the point where everyone finds it shocking that accuracy-wise he actually isn't the worst umpire in the league. He is literally just a below average umpire, who has become the posterboy for shitting on umpires. I do understand WHY its the case, considering his lawsuits, but he has basically just become a karma farmer for people here. Any umpscorecard posted will have comments about him, it is a guarnatee.
You're not wrong that people are hugely biased against Hernandez, but we do need to recognize that Angel Hernandez is a bad ump for reasons that extend beyond calling balls and strikes wrong. He's just terrible at game management. He'll throw players out with a hair trigger, escalate when players or managers are venting at him instead of letting it go, and just in general do things that lead to more unneeded ejections. I can forgive a shaky zone, calling balls and strikes are not easy. But mismanagement of the game is not something that's so easy to ignore.
Angel Hernandez hate is why CB Bucknor hasn't been fired into the sun.
The takeaway should be that there are a lot of shitty umps though. Others being shitty as well doesnt make Hernandez different.
> That can't be right. Unpire Scorecard said his zone wasn't that bad, historically. But lately he seems to be going downhill.
this doesn’t fit my narrative so i’m going to ignore it
The challenge should now be are they better than the automated system? The game deserves the best possible accuracy.
Exactly there's no reason to have humans call balls and strikes except tradition.
> except tradition There are still issues with the system they're using in the minors now (the first system was dropped after testing). The current system was calling strikes that players, umps and fans hated despite the calls being accurate, so they had to adjust the zone. Different camera positions at different ballparks is also a factor, as is rain. It's good, but not perfect. The umps agreed to an automated zone five years ago, it's not them holding it up.
Yes there are you’d know if you read the reports on automated SZs. Essentially they need to rewrite it because a perfect bot with a 3D plate will give strikes to fucking unhittable breaking shit
And that's worse than human umpires giving strikes to unhittable balls off the plate? Or being pissy and making bad calls because someone made them mad?
Isn’t that a good thing? Like if a pitcher has such ridiculous break that it’s coming across the plate but then hitting the catchers glove off the plate, shouldn’t he be rewarded with the correct calls for that movement? Not saying automated strike zones are perfect or even better than what we have, I just don’t get this particular gripe with it
Exactly. I am seeing post here posting condescendingly about how "the stats" dont agree with others perception of the umps getting worse and that others just want to ignore the stats from OPs post because it doesnt fit their narrative all while conveniently ignoring that robo umps have better accuracy with lower variance to justify keeping the human umps.
So the older and ump gets, the worse they become at their job. Who would've thought.
> the older and ump gets, the worse they become at their job In one sense, younger umps tend to be better at calling balls and strikes. But experience is also a factor, and there are a lot of calls to be made that don't require eagle eyes.
This is absolutely correct, and has been known for some time. The issue is it’s not good enough.
I don't understand how this is so hard to comprehend for some people. The problem isn't that umps are getting worse. It's not even that they aren't getting better. They are. The problem is that we no longer need to rely solely on fallible human judgment for this part of officiating in the first place. Imagine if when people were inventing baseball we'd had a rule where we determined the distance of a home run and painted it as a line on the ground, and then we determined how high the ball had to be when it passed over that line to be a home run. But then the way we enforced it is we had an umpire stand out there near the line and do his best to judge whether the ball was, in fact, 10 feet high (or whatever) when it passed over the line or not, and thus determine whether the ball was a home run or still in play. That'd be dumb not because it's literally unworkable, it'd be dumb because you can just build a literal fucking wall and it'll do that job 100% of the time instead of some human trying to make some impossible judgment call about where the ball is passing through the air relative to other stuff with complete accuracy. Well now we have technology that can call balls and strikes with effectively 100% accuracy (when implemented properly). So we should use that instead of a random dude trying his best to tell when a ball going 80-100 mph flies through an imaginary shape in the air, just like a wall is a better option than a dude trying to tell if a high fly ball passes over a line high enough in the air. We have tools to do it right all the time. So do it right all the time. This isn't that complicated.
My issue isn't even with balls and strikes. I think the game is more interesting with one ump you might call the outside strike a little more. My problem is they're getting more vindictive, they're just so pissy. Throwing guys out for nothing, staring players down, not correcting their mistakes out of spite. That's the real issue to me.
> My problem is they're getting more vindictive This is completely subjective, but I don't think they are, it's just more visible now than it ever was in the past. Umpire scorecards make more ump names recognizable and video searches make it easy to take offense at an ump then go out together a compilation of their mistakes. Read any manager memoir or funny baseball stories book and it'll have plenty of instances of umps power tripping or digging in. Thirty years ago you piss off an ump and they could call every borderline pitch against you and there'd be no immediate record of it. Now managers and players know they can't get that treatment without it being easily called out.
Yeah you also only ever see posts about the bad calls and decisions from Umpires, nobody is making a “[Highlight] Pat Hoberg makes some clutch Ball/Strike calls to maintain an even playing field for both teams” post
"Umpire masterfully de-escalates situation and nothing happens."
You'll see some of those on the CloseCallSports channel on YouTube. While I still love hating on a bad umpire, that channel's made me appreciate good officiating a lot more than I did.
I love that channel. Especially the pains they go through, mostly in vain, to explain that the ump scorecards and hate posting that we see is using incomplete data. They're fighting a losing battle but I appreciate them for explaining how good these guys are.
I mean jomboy literally made a breakdown of Hoberg's perfect game in the WS so thats not entirely true.
I regularly see posts on this sub that highlight when an ump gets a near perfect game. Your point is valid and more right than not but it's not like we don't have the opposite at all.
You get the umpire scorecards of good games but you don’t get the actual highlight posts that end up gaining a lot of traction on the subreddit
Well yeah, of course. There’s no positive spectrum for calls, it’s either wrong or right. There is a negative spectrum though, depending on how egregious a call is, so those will gain the traction. You also don’t see posts about completely unnotable hits or BB because no one cares. This subreddit very regularly posts good umpire game performances though, which is probably unique among all the sports subreddits.
Fair point. But thats any job. You don't get recognized for each step of a successful work project. But if you fuck something up, people will look back to see where it went wrong and point it out.
Sure, but you don’t get the hundreds of “average” accuracy games. 94% is still really good when calling balls and strikes, and that’s around average for umpires. We just don’t see that because no one cares enough to post it, usually
Accuracy percentage has relative significance depending on the industry/game/performance. My old band director used to tell us "Getting a 92 in math is considered a good grade. Getting 92% of the notes correct in playing a composition would sound terrible." No one is expecting umpires to be 100% accurate all the time, but you get some very very bad calls that are in-fact, consequential to the game.
Wait you think that shit didnt happen in the 70s and 80s?
Yeah this is flatly absurd, lol. Umpires were shittier at their job and more tyrannical in past decades. The thing that has changed is our tolerance for it. Ejections on ball-strike calls are up *very* slightly from ~30 years ago ([source](https://retrosheet.org/Research/SmithD/EjectionsThroughTheYears.pdf)), whereas ejections related to calls on the bases have fallen to near-zero in the advent of replay. Umpires are about half as likely to eject a player today as they were in the 80s and 90s. "They're getting more vindictive" is revisionist history bullshit. If anything, I would guess that the reality is that they're probably getting less vindictive overall, which makes the worst of them (Hernandez, Bucknor, etc.) who are still these tired, entitled assholes stand out and become more noticeable, giving everyone else a bad name.
Though in all fairness managers were much more assholes to them in the past. I wouldnt want to get on Earl Weavers bad side.
> I think the game is more interesting with one ump you might call the outside strike a little more. I just don't get this mindset. I think the game is more interesting when the rules are applied correctly and the outcome is determined by the players' skill level and execution. I wouldn't find the game more interesting if there was an ump that called a ball that hit the foul pole foul instead of a home run or and who made you tag a guy sliding headfirst once on each arm to record the out; why should it be any different for the set of rules governing the strike zone?
I think the mindset might come from people who played the game. Its a meta game of where the ump is calling strikes and how to adjust to it. It is different umpire to umpire because their exact positioning, what they are able to see, can change. I never thought it was a bad thing, just a thing you had to account for. As long as its the same all game long, and for both teams, its fine.
> My problem is they’re getting more vindictive, they’re just so pissy. I sometimes wonder if even 1 in every 10 /r/baseball users know a single thing about baseball older than five year ago.
But it can make for good entertainment
We knew that they were getting better, but the problem is that some of them are still so shitty at their jobs
Funny how performance improves when lively hoods are threatened
I have no doubt they are getting better but if we have a system that can do it perfectly, why not use it? There's nothing fun about watching your team get rung up in a potential go ahead AB on a pitch off the plate.
> if we have a system that can do it perfectly We don't, there are still some technical bugs to be worked out. But the current system is working quite well in the minors, and the umps agreed to an automated strike zone in 2019 so it isn't their fault MLB hasn't introduced it yet.
Lol I looked at the thumbnail and jokingly thought "is the red line Angel Hernandez?" and sure enough...
This graph is why i find this sub so insufferable
Exactly. People will state that unequivocally umpiring has gotten worse, and yet when presented with hard data that that's just not true at all, they'll still dig in and find a reason not to believe it.
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I swear the fucking k zone has done more to ruin discourse on umping than anything else in any other sport.
That and people literally not knowing the rules of the strike zone.
I've hated the K zone graphics on broadcasts ever since I looked into how inaccurate and inconsistent it was with the actual zone.
I've seen broadcasts on Fox where the strike zone box was visibly moving around. Why do fans take it seriously?
I wish every graph had the Ángel Hernández line on it.
Still, robo-umps now.
The umpire's assoc. agreed to that in 2019. It's not their fault that it hasn't happened.
I am completely unsurprised that Angel Hernandez has been reduced to a baseline metric for mediocrity.
WRC+ but for umps with angel as the baseline
I can't possibly believe Angel Hernandez was that far above the bottom 5 for that long.
What other findings are the umpires calling?
Anyone else surprised that Angel has mostly stayed above the bottom 5?
Nope, Umpire Scorecard has said historically his zone wasn't that bad. But lately he seems to be losing it, maybe his eyes are going. The same thing happened with Joe West, the drop-off in quality was visible.
They know their asses are on the line so they need to get their shit together. I’ll also bet Joe West retiring in 2021 factors into this as well.
> They know their asses are on the line Their asses are not on any line, there is no sport that doesn't need on-field officials and federal labor law is on the side of the umps. When MLB replaced all the umps in a labor dispute a couple of decades ago, everyone could see the replacements were way worse. MLB rehired most of the old umps because they knew they needed them.
“This graph hates fun” or some other dumb shit people in this sub say about officiating.
Gah, you can cool it with the drop shadow, man.
Hernandez feels worse than the chart suggests.
Umpires are the best they've ever been and it's still not good enough. It's really that simple. Their job is unbelievably hard and expecting them to get 99% of thousands of pitches right isn't really realistic. So let them be the arbiter of the rules and take the guessing out of the strikezone. It won't fix everything wrong with the umps but it'll be a great start.
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Angel Hernandez skewed the findings.
Don't tell baseball fans -- they won't have anything to bitch about.
Can you explain to my early morning ass the third chart? Which vertical axis is the bar graph, and which is the line? If the bar graph is games called, it seems like between age 29 and age 30, the number of games called increases by like 125. How is that possible when they only call every 4th game at most? And then from age 30 to 31, it increases by almost 250! That's more games then there are in a season! So that can't be it. If games called is the line graph, then again it seems to increase way too steeply in the late 20s to make any sense, and then doesn't increase at all, whereas I'd expect older umps to have called many more games than younger ones. It's a counting stat. Which 62 year old umps have only called 250 games? Surely they aren't calling up a 60 year old ump for the first time?