Umpiring Our Existential Crisis

Image credit: © Thomas Shea-USA TODAY Sports

The last line of Bruce Springsteen’s song “Born to Run” is a repeated line belted out with unmistakable belief that makes it memorable⁠—”Tramps like us / baby we were born to run,” for the uninitiated⁠—like an echo somehow growing instead of fading. It’s iconic. What’s more interesting, though, is the second-to-last line in the song and how Bruce almost mutters it: “We’re gonna get to that place / where we really wanna go and we’ll walk in the sun.” In italics is what gets muttered, the way a main point might get the yada-yada treatment in conversation to sneak it in as an aside. 

The baseball equivalent is a 3-0 count, in which the umpire tries to casually sneak in a called strike to make it 3-1 and let the pitcher hang around a little longer. You know the pitch. If you’re of a certain age and time, you might call it the Jamie Moyer special. And despite how many times you have circled the sun you know the one-of-a-kind deflation that comes with seeing a pitch clearly off the plate, whether the broadcast uses the K-zone or not, and it being called a strike. You’ve seen innings and games and series and, maybe most importantly, moments unfurl because of it. You have tasted the sour taste that accompanies the event, and you have relayed game details to partners or friends with a conditional “if” or “but” that they have generously heard before moving on. 

Part of the frustration comes with the assumption that the free strike, regardless of where the pitch was thrown and whether it was actually over the plate, was bound to happen. But is it? 

This is a plain chart that gives a lot of potentially complicated details to think about but it’s worth it, like your favorite Dan Flashes shirt. In the middle column we can see that the rate at which pitchers get a strike in a 3-0 count in a given season has a wide-ish range, but is ultimately consistent. This is the kind of variance you can reasonably expect given the way control can vary from year to year for even the best pitchers, as well as small changes in the ball that impact its movement or other details that go into throwing it. However, what’s made clearer by the column on the right is how the free called strike on undeserving offerings out of the zone has consistently decreased. 

What this really asks of us is to examine our relationship with umpires. There has been a debate in baseball over the last few years debating the merits of an automated ball and strike system. If you’re a person who’s extremely online, you’ve at least seen passive-aggressive quote tweets advocating for them with only robot emojis in the body, if you haven’t sent them yourself. The gist of the argument is that umpires are bad at their jobs, unfit for a game where the players’ skills have advanced so much and a time that offers an apersonal solution that is quickly trusted to be better.

By and large, the sentiment and its consequences are real, whether the situation is or not. The automated strike zone is already in the minor leagues. If you’re one of the few dozen people who somehow both subscribe to Peacock and found the Futures game this past weekend, you witnessed it. In due time the system will be in the majors, creating giggles and goofs for those who are subjected to it and those who fail to understand the way it works alike. Whether the criticism dies down when an umpire is merely relaying a result from the machine is a question, or perhaps unintended consequence, yet to be confronted. Like most things we’re not willing to consider now, maybe we never will be. 

There’s something else about that muttered Springsteen lyric from up top that’s relevant here, too. Walking in the sun can get sweaty. If you live in Washington, DC, you slink through a stupid swamp town for a considerable portion of the year. If you live in New Jersey you have described recent days as Jell-O, or some other pervasive gelatinous blob. The heat hollows out the Midwest like its old factories and portions of the West Coast have gone through record-setting droughts in recent years. You cannot possibly walk in the sun for any consistent amount of time right now, or perhaps ever again, without getting uncomfortable. And baseball is a game that often requires it. 

Despite this, and the regular swipes at their credibility, umpires have gotten better at their job, at least in this circumstance. They know they’re under constant scrutiny and, or because, the machines are coming. That the strike zone that is fed to you through your television, which probably isn’t calibrated as often as it ought to be and doesn’t account for players of different sizes, is giving you an impression of laser certainty on every pitch despite constantly regarding it as only a two-dimensional space. That graphic-aided report cards circulate in the public sphere after games, providing another tool that undercuts umps’ authority in ways that would have been difficult to imagine 10, or even five, years ago—like lots of things we regard as commonplace in today’s game. 

It’s not so much about saluting and offering praise for our dear umpires, but underscoring how our reaction to unfavorable situations, mild as they may be, accounts for more than reality is actually offering. I’d bet that in no less than 10% of games I’ve watched this year, I’ve thought something along the lines of “oof, that guy just got squeezed.” And then I’d keep watching and see how one measly call rolls into the next, creating a chain of events that reminds me how big one moment can be. Granted, this includes non 3-0 counts, but even if I limit it to just those I’d tab my possible dread at 30% for a phantom unfavorable call. Yet, the data says it’s happening just 5% of the time, and has steadily gone down in each of the last few years. Maybe it’s not dipping enough to satiate a culture obsessed with being right about something that already happened more than it’s concerned with being ready for what’s next. Maybe it’s something much smaller. But that doesn’t change how we’re often off the mark or how each time we’re wrong is also a chance to be relieved more than aggrieved.