Everybody Needs Accountability
Are you accountable?
Today is Major League Baseball’s official Opening Day (the recent two-day series in Japan notwithstanding). That means a baseball-themed TBL. And go Padres!
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Everybody Needs Accountability
Baseball umpires have one job: To describe reality accurately. Ball or strike. Fair or foul. Safe or out.
In other sports, the official/referee/umpire makes calls on an as-needed basis, such as whether the ball has gone out-of-bounds, but baseball’s home-plate umpire is mandated by the rules of the game to describe reality on every play. It is crucial to the game, difficult, and often controversial.
The umpire’s role is mundane much of the time, but once in a while….
In May of 1999, Cliff Floyd of the Florida Marlins hit a double. Second-base umpire Greg Gibson confirmed it wasn’t an HR. A brouhaha ensued. The umpires got together and decided it really was a home run. When the Cardinals went nuts, crew chief Frank Pulli decided to have a look at television replay in the Marlins’ dugout, even though the rules made no provision for it. When he did, he corrected the call: double; not home run.
The Marlins protested the game, won by the Cardinals, 5-2, pointing in particular to Pulli’s use of the video playback. The National League let the call and the outcome stand, but castigated Pulli for having gone outside the rules.
“Use of the video replay is not an acceptable practice,” NL president Leonard Coleman announced in his decision.
“The integrity of the game requires that judgments be left to on-field personnel. Part of the beauty of baseball is that it is imperfect. ...Traditionally, baseball has relied on the eyes of the umpires as opposed to any artificial devices for its judgments. I fully support this policy. Occasionally, however, the umpires too will make mistakes; that is also part of the game.”
Baseball has been slow to make changes generally and, particularly, with respect to technology.
Television instant replay has been around since 1963, when CBS producer Tony Verna introduced it during the network’s broadcast of the Army-Navy college football showdown that year. The NFL began experimenting with the use of replay to enhance officiating in 1976 and began implementing it a decade later. The NHL instituted its usage in 1991. The NBA followed suit in 2002.
MLB was last to the instant replay party, finally adding it to check on home runs on August 28, 2008, nine years after Frank Pulli dipped his toe into the water.
In 2014, the use of replay in MLB was expanded and is now an expected part of the game, as it is in all major professional sports, even though “judgment calls” like balls and strikes, remain unreviewable. Still, it means more replay challenges and fewer face-to-face screaming matches like the one below, which came on a balk call five pitches into the game and features Hall of Fame manager1 Earl Weaver and long-time umpire Bill Haller.
However, it appears that baseball may soon become the first major sport to flip the relationship between official and technology, allowing an Automated Ball-Strike System (the so-called “robot umps”) to make the initial call.2 ABS uses high-speed cameras and complex algorithms to determine whether a pitch is a ball or a strike. A pitch challenge system was tested by MLB in Spring Training this year (where, yes, Phillies fans have booed the robots), and has already been used by multiple minor leagues over four years.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has said he would be interested in using the automated system in 2026, perhaps with a review system or perhaps to make every call. Either way, the goal is for everyone involved to trust that every call, and thus the outcome of every game, is determined by the game itself, not by the potentially flawed decisions of human umpires. As an 11 year-old North Carolina boy, when he came up with a robot umpire idea when assigned a school project to “invent something,” noted: “I just got tired of seeing bad calls.”
According to long-time umpire Joe West (now retired), “[t]hree ways you can miss a call: lack of concentration, lack of positioning, lack of timing.” Robots don’t share those problems.
Unlike humans, robot umpires don’t blink, don’t get distracted, and aren’t fazed by weather, glare, or who is pitching.
Context is irrelevant to robot umps. The strike zone is the same, no matter the situation. First inning. Third inning. Ninth inning. Runners on base. Nobody on base. Runner trying to steal. Great pitcher. Rookie. Journeyman. Fastball. Curve. Slider. Sweeper. Sinker. Cutter. Control pitcher. Wild pitcher. Close game. Blow-out. Well-framed pitch. Poorly-framed pitch. 3-0. 0-2. 3-2. Key situation. Mundane situation. The ABS strike zone is always the same.
Human umpires struggle with all of that.
Using data from Major League Baseball on 756,848 pitches over 313,774 at-bats in 4,914 games (two full seasons), Jerry Kim of Columbia and Brayden King at Northwestern found that umpires, overall, called a strike on 18.8 percent of pitches that were actually out of the strike zone and a ball on 12.9 percent of pitches that were, in fact, strikes. However, exhibiting the “Matthew Effect3,” behind-the-plate umpires were reliably more generous in their calls with highly regarded pitchers than they were with lesser hurlers.
For over two decades now, Major League Baseball has used technology to determine, after the fact, the accuracy of umpiring decisions.4 This information is then used to incentivize umpires by, for example, assigning more-accurate umpires to lucrative play-off games. Despite such incentives, MLB umpires favored high-status pitchers, more often over-recognizing their pitches (calling balls strikes)5 and less often under-recognizing them (calling strikes balls). Umpires generally widen the strike zone for high-status pitchers and shrink the strike zone for low-status pitchers.
More specifically, umpires are 25 percent more likely to call a ball a strike for the five-time All-Star than for a pitcher with no All-Star appearances and are 14 percent less likely to call a strike a ball for a five-time All-Star than a non-All-Star. The more All-Star appearances, the greater the advantage. The pitchers who benefit the most are those pitchers who have a lot of All-Star experience and have a reputation for controlling the strike zone. Thus, for example, Greg Maddux (eight All-Star games) got more calls than Randy Johnson (10 All-Star games).
Obvious conclusion: Umpires are human.
Over more than a decade (2008-2019), Major League home-plate umpires made every pitch call correctly on one team roughly twice per season. Among the 114 umpires with at least 5,000 called pitches during that time, the range between the least accurate and most accurate umps was narrower than 4 percentage points, ranging from 86.2 percent at the low end to 90.1 percent at the high end, with an average of 88.5 percent.
But MLB umpires are getting better. The aggregate accuracy data, in five-year increments, as seen below, shows steady improvement.
The 2024 accuracy percentage actually ticked down a bit, from 92.81 percent in 2023 to 92.53. Nevertheless, there were over 28,000 more correct calls last season than in 2008, the first year of available data.
In 2024, Derek Thomas was the best umpire, getting 95.8 percent of his ball-strike calls correct. He was promoted to the majors in 2023. Larry Vanover was the worst, at 92.1 percent, and he retired following 30 years as an MLB umpire after the season. Notice how much higher those scores (even the worst score!) are than those from just 10 years ago.
If there’s one thing we know about economics (and it applies much more broadly, of course), it’s that incentives work. Everybody does better when they have skin in the game.
Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel made the case for using technology for accountability purposes, as far back as 1960.
“I believe every umpire should take an examination in which his ball-and-strike decisions are compared to some sort of photographic record of just where the pitches really were. They use radar and electronics for everything else. I don’t know why it can’t be done in baseball.”
Casey was right.
Umpire performance started getting better – a lot better – when technology began to show them when they were right and wrong and when MLB incentivized them to be right. Such accountability leads to trust, our culture’s greatest deficit.
None of us is perfect. Not even close. But, everyone can be accountable.
If we’re going to get better at anything, we need to be accountable. Make sure you have people and processes in place to hold yourself (and the people you are responsible for) accountable. Ultimately, it’s an act of compassion and grace, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
Everybody needs accountability.
Totally Worth It
Feel free to contact me via rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter (@rpseawright) and let me know what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see changed, and what you’d add. Praise, condemnation, and feedback are always welcome.
The average 4-seam fastball speed increased from 91.9 miles per hour to 94.3 miles per hour over the last 20 years, and the number of pitches over 100 miles per hour increased from 214 in 2008 to more than 3,300 in 2024. That aggregated additional strain adds up, and it is flaying the ligaments of the best in the sport, bit by bit. Ulnar collateral ligament procedures, the so-called Tommy John surgery, are up 170 percent across the major and minor leagues since 2010.
Americans spent $14 billion on sports wagering in January of 2024, up from $1.1 billion in January 2019. An estimated 60 percent of American adults say they gambled within the past year.
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Benediction
Karl Barth was the most influential theologian of the 20th Century, and the most prolific. The Barmen Declaration, of which he was the primary author, answered the threat of Nazism as few could or did. His unfinished multi-volume Church Dogmatics, alone, was 17,000 pages.
In 1962, Professor Barth visited America and spoke at Rockefeller Chapel (really a Gothic cathedral) on the campus of the University of Chicago. After his lecture, during Q&A, a student asked Barth if he could summarize his life’s work in theology in a sentence. Barth said something like, “Yes, I can. In the words of a song I learned at my mother’s knee: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’”
A lovely choral arrangement of that song is this week’s benediction.
We live on “a hurtling planet,” the poet Rod Jellema informed us, “swung from a thread of light and saved by nothing but grace.” To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that offers hope and love. And may grace have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.
As always, thanks for reading.
Issue 187 (March 27, 2025)
Using the same Hawk-Eye camera technology professional tennis has used to determine line calls for over 20 years, first used in 2001, for cricket matches. The technology isn’t perfect, but it’s remarkably good. In the minors, baseball has tested challenge systems and an approach whereby every pitch is called ABS. The most recent ABS iteration calls strikes based entirely on where the ball crosses the midpoint of home plate, 8.5 inches from the front and back; the top of the strike zone is 53.5 percent of the batter's heigh while the bottom is 27 percent.
The “Matthew Effect” is a phenomenon whose influence reaches far beyond baseball. It gets its name from Matthew 25:29.
“For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.”
This idea is partly a matter of resources. High-status individuals tend to have more resources at their disposal, which they can use to achieve better results. But the Matthew Effect is also about perception, as in MLB.
Efforts have been underway for more than a century to improve the accuracy of umpires through automation. A 1916 “automatic umpire” included a strike zone cut out of canvas. Guy T. Lansford applied for a patent in 1936 for a system using photo electric cells, whereby the ball would have to pass through a wall of “transparent” light to be considered a strike, causing a gong to ring out (perhaps inspiration for the Houston Astros). Other variations from 1938 and 1939 used light beams to detect a ball passing through the strike zone. Robot umps date to 1950 (1955 version here; 1965 here). Statcast finally made it possible.
Interestingly, high-status hitters didn’t get nearly the same benefit of the doubt, although their benefit was still significant. Veteran, Caucasian, and home-team pitchers also received measurable benefits from umpires. The called strike zone also varies with the count. Thus, for example, it is typically smaller than normal on 0-2 and larger than normal on 3-0.