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Thursday, February 24, 2011
How one umpire retiring can change the entire face of baseball!
Three veteran umpires are retiring this year - Chuck Meriweather, Mike Reilly, and Jerry Crawford. So how is this going to impact the game, you may ask? Good question!
Crawford has one of the smallest strike zones among all umpires - not THE smallest, but among the top 3 (or so).
How much does his small strike zone affect run scoring. About .3 runs per game that he umps (behind the plate of course).
A full time ump is behind the plate for about 35 games a year (although last year, he only did 25 for some reason), or 1.44% of all games. So assuming that Crawford’s games are replaced by umpires with an average zone (actually ever-so-slightly larger, now that he is gone), run scoring overall will decrease by around .004 rpg, not an insignificant amount.
Do you think that that is more or less than the impact of baseball losing Adam Wainwright? Assuming that he is replaced by a replacement pitcher, and he would have thrown 200 innings, the NL gains around 44 runs or .034 rpg, or a .018 rpg for both leagues combined, which is almost 5 times the value of losing Crawford, in the other direction of course.
Adding the loss of Strasburg (and replacing him with a replacement pitcher), the NL gains another 50 runs or so, or .038 rpg in the NL and .021 rpg overall in MLB.
Of course, I am cherry-picking Strasburg and Wainwright (but not Crawford, really). Each year, MLB loses and gains good and bad pitchers and batters and in the long-run, it is a net zero (actually, both pitchers and batters probably get slightly better each year, offsetting one another so that run scoring stays about the same, barring other changes in one direction or another).
Anyway, I thought this was a fun thought.
The only bad part about this post is that the name “Joe West” was not among the list of retiring umpires.
I don’t know how much run scoring will change when West goes away forever, but I know the “How Awesome is Baseball” scale will go up about eleventy billion points. That guy is so much worse for the game than any steroid ever could be.