Progressive Tweaks

Posted by Bill Baer on Wednesday, July 8, 2009 at 8:47 pm

At Beyond the Box Score, there’s a debate about umpires in Major League Baseball. Jack Moore thinks a computerized system needs to be implemented to call balls and strikes; tbsmkdn doesn’t. I’m in agreement with the continuation of the use of human umpires mostly from a cost perspective.

John Walsh of The Hardball Times two years ago concluded:

This would imply that the contribution of the umps to the overall accuracy is, at most, a little over two inches (see the Resources section if you’re curious about how I get this number). Two inches is not as good as Williams’ estimate, but I think it’s pretty darn good.

Walsh thinks that the umpires generally do a decent job of calling balls and strikes, and from simply watching a bunch of games, that seems like a reasonable conclusion. Additionally, I think many fans, and even players and coaches for that matter, suffer from attentional bias when it comes to balls and strikes.

We always notice when an umpire blows a call because it stands out. This article from late August 2007 states, “[the umpires'] accuracy rate is 99 percent for baseline calls and 97 percent for balls and strikes.” When an umpire misses a baseline call — a one-in-100 shot according to the article — we will notice it because it happens infrequently.

Poker players suffer from this issue as well. When they have pocket aces, they don’t remember all of the times they’ve won with it, but damned if they can’t tell you every single time they lost with them. They can tell you what the board read, how many chips were in the pot, what was written on the guy’s shirt, etc.

Furthermore, we remember all of the bad calls umpires make, particularly against teams we root for. As an example, I still remember a Braves-Phillies game many years ago in which Rafael Furcal hit a home run down the left field line that was wrongfully ruled fair. I can’t tell you who won the game, who pitched, who hit home runs (besides Furcal), or the final score, but I know that Furcal hit that pseudo-home run.

Umpires generally do a fantastic job and replacing them with a computerized system likely won’t improve the accuracy of the calls by any significant measure. Instead, it will likely end up costing a whole lot more money and causing too many headaches for the venture to be worthwhile. That’s not to say that I don’t take issue with umpires at all, but any changes that should be made are small in nature.

For instance, an umpire shouldn’t have the ability to refuse to review a call. Consider a Red Sox-Phillies game from mid-June:

The Phillies nearly won it in the 11th when, with two men on, pinch-hitter Greg Dobbs hit a towering shot just to the right of the rightfield foul pole. With the fans chanting “REPLAY! REPLAY!” Manuel came out to discuss the ruling with first-base umpire Jim Joyce. Manuel asked to have the play reviewed, but his request was denied.

“I asked him, ‘Why?’ ” Manuel said. “I said I wanted it reviewed. He said it was [his] call. He said, ‘I stayed on it, Charlie. And it was foul.’ “

Umpires being stubborn and unwilling to admit that they may have missed the call is certainly not a common problem but it’s not nonexistent. An umpire should have to review a disputed call.

Even worse for the Phillies was that a week later, review was wrongfully used against them in a game against the Tampa Bay Rays.

Burrell hit a drive to left-center field that bounced into the seats, and the speedy Crawford rounded third base and headed home. Umpires went to replay, checking to see whether a fan touched the ball as it hopped up.

If there had been interference, they could have awarded Crawford home plate. But umpires must make that determination on their own, without replay.

After a video review of 1 minute, 36 seconds, umpires said the ball cleanly skipped into the seats, calling it a ground-rule double and sending Crawford back to third. Carlos Pena then popped up to end the inning, and the Rays wound up winning 10-4.

So, the umpires aren’t perfect; they’re human and err from time to time. That isn’t grounds to completely shove them out of the game. It should be incentive to make progressive tweaks to the system.

As an example, I suggest that an indifferent third (fourth?) party should be used to review plays since all umpires are at least slightly biased by themselves and are less likely to admit fault and reverse calls when necessary.

Additionally, several more cameras should be utilized to provide even more information. This idea was motivated by a comment I read on a Phillies forum regarding the Dobbs foul home run.

The other possibility would be to use triangulation from two different, perfectly-synchronized cameras. Suppose in addition to the camera (roughly) behind the plate, there’s another camera somewhere down in the left field corner that was pointing towards right field at the time. If the frames are time-synched, and if the exact position of both cameras is known, simple trigonometry can be employed to determine the location of the ball in several frames as it passes close to the pole, and thus the path of the ball.

You have to admit (or maybe it’s just me) that it would be pretty cool to see trigonometry used in a baseball game. Anything that prevents the umpires from being the sole arbiters of rulings — anything that provides some oversight, in other words — is a progressive tweak that should at least be considered. Making knee-jerk, emotional responses to umpires isn’t going to fix the system, but neither is simply accepting the status quo.