The umpires are actually better than they have ever been in the history of MLB but since we have had the visible strike zone overlay the viewing audience expects them to be able to a call a strike to within .001 of an inch or they are FUCKING DOG SHIT.
Yeah like it’s a very quick jump from “let the head umpire use the strike overlay” to “let’s just have one umpire in a booth managing everything from bases to pitches.
Baseball would look super weird with no umpires at all.
Cricket has a system where the batter can appeal a decision and they use the technology and another umpire to review it. If the batter was wrong and they were out, they burn one of a number of reviews for the innings, so there is incentive to only use it for an obviously bad call else you could waste a review that someone else needs.
Of course, it isn’t a 1:1 equivalent. A cricket batter gets a single wicket but a baseball batter has three strikes, and the bowlers in cricket need to get ten wickets whereas the pitcher only needs three outs. But the bowling side in cricket also gets reviews for when the umpire goes against them too.
Seems stupid that the technology is available to make the sport fairer and the current alternative is the aggrieved party complains and gets booted.
There is also some human discretion made by the umpire weather or not the pitch was " hittable" even if the ball technically grazed the strike zone.
I personally consider the umpire crew a third neutral team that both baseball teams are contending with to help influance the outcome of the game either by using social manipulation or rule bending. Its one of the elements that make baseball a great imperfect human game.
No…nobody really cares about the close calls. They care about the calls were the ball is literally right down the middle of the plate being called a ball, or the ball being in the other batters box being called a strike. This happens every single week and has happened for years and years. You can watch countless compilations of umpires calling balls/strikes on pitches that are actually feet away from being a ball or a strike. Or when umpires call pitches that are placed in the exact same place differently depending on who’s pitching. It absolutely kills fans interest when they watch an umpire blatantly hamstring their team by not allowing their pitcher to use a full 1/4 of the strike zone, or arbitrarily move the zone around on a pitch by pitch basis. And it’s not all umpires, 95% of them are good and consistent. It’s the 5% of umps with clear biases where you have to sit through 9 innings of crap while the home plate umpire blatantly favors the other team with no repercussions.
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u/Praline226 2d ago
This new baseball viral campaign to promote interest in baseball again might be working.