MLB umpire rankings: Pat Hoberg is baseball’s most accurate ump

Some umpires are very good at calling balls and strikes. The article includes a list of the best. Spoiler. Angel Hernandez is not on the list.

Major League Baseball has a lightning problem, study shows

During a night when every Major League Baseball team is in action, odds are that lightning activity is unsafely close to at least one of its stadiums, a recent study found.

Talk about a wide strike zone.

MLB umpires to announce replay review decisions to fans

Umpires will now be equipped with on-field microphones to inform the crowd and television audience of instant replay reviews beginning with exhibition games at stadiums this weekend, Major League Baseball announced Friday.

Crew chiefs will wear a microphone, via a belt pack, and will proceed to one of the baselines when a replay is initiated and face the press box to make the announcement. They’ll announce who is making the challenge, what is being challenged and then announce the verdict after the review is completed.

“I think opening up communication with the fans is a step in the right direction,” Detroit Tigers manager AJ Hinch said Friday morning. “It’ll become mainstream, very fast.”

Hinch indicated several umpires expressed nervousness about speaking publicly in that manner, since it’s never been part of their job.

They waited til Joe West retired to put a mic in an umpire’s hands.

After 5,460 games, Joe West is calling it a career

Baseball is entertaining. A little less now. Thanks, Joe.

An Illustrated Guide of Missed Strike Calls

The Stab
A classic as old as our appreciation of framing. If you want to present a pitch as a strike, a still glove is key. This one was a strike, and it wasn’t a cross up; it was just Daulton Varsho making a mess out of a pitch he had to know was coming:

Did Jean Segura’s half-hearted bunt attempt throw him off his mechanics, or perhaps confuse the umpire’s sense of the bottom of the zone? Maybe! For a call like this to get missed, something has to go really wrong. That pitch was six inches above the bottom of the zone, squarely in not-even-close-to-a-ball territory. The worst part of this one is that it would have been easily avoided. J.B. Wendelken didn’t miss the target by much. If Varsho had kept his glove down the whole time rather than first pulling it up and then recovering back down, I’m fairly certain this would have been called a strike.

This isn’t the most exaggerated stab you’ll see. That motion, though – reaching down for the ball with the glove – just looks like a ball. It wasn’t a ball, of course. We have the luxury of the white strike zone box – and exact three-dimensional coordinates – but between that dipping motion and the bunt attempt, it was simply a missed call. Usually, umpires get these right. Stab often enough as a catcher, though, and you’ll lose strikes. There’s a reason Varsho grades out as indifferent at best with the glove. It’s not this pitch in particular, but it’s an accumulation of things like this pitch.