The 2021 season has had it’s ups and downs, from crazy records being broken and insane comebacks in the 9th inning, to ejections and suspensions, as well as firings and trades, this season has been nothing short of crazy. One con most pointed to not just in pro baseball, but in baseball in general, is umpiring. Umpires tend to get a bad rap for being bad at their job, and from time to time every umpire will make a stupid mistake. It’s basically a stereotype for umpires, they are all blind and stupid. There are some umpires in pro ball that really emphasize this stereotype, and it seems almost every week they do something stupid. Many have argued the case for robot umpires, umpires who will never make mistakes and umpire the game perfectly. The strike zone will be 100% correct, outs on the basepaths will be 100% correct, and confusing situations will be nailed to a T. But we would never imagine robo umps if the normal umps were good. Let’s find out just how bad umpires were this year.
A twitter account named Umpire Scorecards came out in 2020 that showed umpire report cards every night. It shows the correct call ratio and percentage, the consistency of the calls, stuff like that. Take a look at an example of one here.
Laz Diaz for example had a really bad game in this Astros win in game 4 of the ALCS. He had only an 88% accuracy. Look at all of the red dots around the strike zone on the bottom left. Those are 14-15 pitches out of the zone by roughly 3 inches that got called. I understand that umpiring is a very tough job, but we can’t have this happen, especially in the playoffs.
Some umpires have a worse rap than others. Some notoriously bad umpires are Angel Hernandez, Joe West, Mike Estabrook and Tom Hallion. They are all experienced, old and bad umpires. They have really bad judgement and are made fun of for it. Now, I do have respect for umpires. They have a lot on their plate and have to make a lot of calls during the game. They have tough angles to look from and only seconds to make a call, and for the most part they do it well. However there are some times where it seems umpires go rogue and get one sided almost and start making really bad calls. For example, probably the most notorious call of the 2021 season was this one here . This was game 5 of the NLDS in the bottom of the 9th with the tying run on first base and Wilmer Flores down 0-2 trying to walk it off. This ended the Giants season and sent the Dodgers to the NLCS. The internet and all of the baseball community has gone wild over it. But this wasn’t the only controversial call that was made this year. There were MANY bad calls, and I won’t get into all of them because you would just stop reading this article because it would be too long.
One cause of these absolutely atrocious calls is the replay system. Look at the NBA for example, they have a good replay system. The referees head straight to a monitor and check it out for themselves. They have so many high quality cameras in so many spots to give the best possible angles to look at to make the right call for themselves. However the MLB is the opposite of this. Yes, they have many high quality cameras all in different spots, but the umpires aren’t actually the ones making the call. They put on headsets and call people in a different STATE to check and review it for them, as opposed to making the call for themselves. So the umpires have to go off of what they say. That’s why you see terribly missed calls like this one on Elvis Andrus. I mean it’s a bad call against the umpire, but this play can easily be corrected and fixed. But MLB relies upon people from New York to make the call for them. That way they don’t have close up in the moment view of the play. They need to change it so that the umpires make the call and not the replay officials somewhere else.
Now, there is kind of a downside to replacing umpires with robots. It will completely change the game and history of it. It ruins the old school tradition of people making decisions for the game as opposed to robots. But I do think that this change is for the better and will make the games shorter as well. People have talked about pace of play in baseball, and I think robo umps will help. No reviews of plays that take up 5 minutes, no bickering and arguing that results in ejections and suspensions. It will speed most games up by 10, maybe 20 minutes.
Umpires can suck sometimes, and with new technology arriving, umpires could be soon replaced with robots. They would never make a mistake, and the players and fans would be more engaged in the game. If someone is worried about what call the umps make, it can alter your mental plan and preformance. If you go up to the plate worried about something getting called a strike, you will take pitches that are strikes and get behind. Don’t let the umpires control the game, and switching to robo umps will relieve others of that stress.
