Two bad balls don't strike me as good
To dad… everyone seems to be talking about margins of error these days. As usual, the smartest takes come from the mouths of babes. In this case, your genius grandson, Ethan.
This pitch is clearly outside the strike zone. The ump called it a strike. OK, “human error.” I get that a ball going ninety plus miles per hour and breaking several feet can look like a ball when it’s actually a strike. I get that a superimposed two-dimensional box is a poor stand-in for three-dimensional life. But come on. This seems to happen a lot. And, a lot of the time, the bad calls go against your team. The team you cheer for or bet on.
Ethan found this site that calls balls and strikes on the people who call balls and strikes. It adjudicates the adjudicators. It umps the umps.
Umps were under 90% right about 5% of the time. Ok. Sure. Some wrong calls. No one is perfect. Plus, you’d think things would even out in the wash. The more wrong calls umps make the more even the wrongsidedness would be. Let’s ignore the video tape and go to the data. Seven times this year, the Red Sox played the White Sox. At worst, you might lose a sock in the dryer. In all seven games, the umps got more than 90% of the pitches right. Even then, in three of the seven games, the umps few bad calls gave one team at least half an extra run.
The few, most talented people who adjudicate games got so much stuff wrong that they changed the outcome of 9% of MLB games this year.
This is outside margin of error. Let’s see if we get things more right the stakes are higher. The playoffs.
The crews that call playoffs games get more balls and strikes right than their more massive regular-season brethren. They still managed to change the winner of two out of 27 playoff games. If you’d like to know which games, drop me a note in the comment section.
“Outside the margin of error” is a phrase we read or hear a lot these days. A lot of the time, it has a lot more to do with things more important than baseball scores.