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Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Umpires and close plays
Umpires missed 47 calls in a sample of 184 games, according to an ESPN study. That’s an average of 0.26 missed calls per game. Is that a little, or alot? Since balls/strikes are not involved here, excluding walks, strikeouts and hit batters, and there’s about 27 or so other PA involved per game. And there’d be some 16 or so runners on base, so that’s 43 batters/runners to deal with. Throw in some pickoff attempts, and various other multiple plays on the same runners, and let’s make it an even 50 total calls available per game.
LOTS of those are gimmes. If you have 49 gimmes, then the umpire missed 0.26 calls on the other one non-gimme play. If you have 40 gimmes, the umpure missed 0.26 calls on the other 10 non-gimme plays. In order to know about that 0.26, you need to know the distribution of gimme to non-gimme plays. Ideally, it would look something like that:
0.50 impossible naked-eye plays, of which the umpire might as well flip a coin, gets half wrong (or 0.25 missed calls)
10.00 really really tough plays, of which the umpire’s skill set comes into play, gets .01 missed calls (or one-tenth of 1%)
39.50 of varying toughness to grade, of which umpires get them all right
That’s the idea. Now, realistically, what do we have?
0.20 impossible naked-eye plays, and umpire misses 0.10 calls
0.80 really really tough plays, and umpire misses 0.16 (or 20%)
49.0 of the rest, of which umpire get them all right
As you can see, depending on how you figure out the frequency distribution of plays available, you can’t tell how good an umpire is.
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