Umpire Greg Gibson - Mike Carlson/Getty Images
Early this season, in the MLB there seems to be an inconsistency on umpires calling balls and strikes. Many of these balls and strikes on the outside of the plate were miscalled.
The calls are picked up by many announcers, informing the audience that these obvious calls are blasphemy.
Balls and Strikes In the MLB
With the improvement of technology, challenging balls, and strikes naturally come with the game. TV broadcasts also zone in on boxed graphics of the strike zone, showing the audience where the pitch should land.
In other words, these box graphics show the umpire ruling the pitch of a ball. For the TV viewers, they can clearly see if the pitch thrown is a strike and, if so, if the call by the umpire was muffed.
Could it Transform Into the ABS System?
The question here is, what will baseball umpiring look like in the future? The Automated Ball System or ABS exists at the minor league level currently.
It is similar to tennis where it shows if the ball landed clearly in or out. In the MLB, the ABS will show if the pitch landed in or out of the strike zone.
What To Do Going Forward In the MLB
Current Texas Rangers pitcher, Max Scherzer is presently on a rehab assignment at Triple-A Round Rock (a league that utilizes an automated ball system to determine balls and strikes).
Scherzer stated he was not a supporter of the removal of the human element from the MLB. He does want the electronic strike zone implemented to help his own plan to improve the standard of umpire’s performances.
“We need to rank the umpires,” Scherzer said, via Shawn McFarland of the Dallas Morning News. “Let the electronic strike zone rank the umpires. We need to have a conversation about the bottom- let’s call it 10%, whatever you want to declare the bottom is- and talk about relegating those umpires to the minor leagues.”
The former Cy Young winner did go on to say that the majority of the umpires in the MLB, “do good work”, but there needs to be “some mechanism to hold the worst performers accountable.”
Let’s now take a look at some of the “unbelievable calls”, or should I say “controversial calls” that we are all talking about:
I think that you would have either had to be visually impaired, or you just wanted to finish up the game early and leave to go home and have dinner to make these calls.
That was definitely a strike-out in the MLB; I would hate to see what a perfect pitch would have to be in Diaz’s calls.
Poor, Poor Aaron Boone; he really, really did get screwed this time. For instance, you don’t see in this clip that it was a fan behind the bench in a blue shirt that said something to the umpire that got him thrown out.
In other words, the high-energy manager doesn’t have a problem getting himself thrown out on his own.
However, I am not quite sure how this season’s games instantly brought the umpires from behind the plate to up front and center?
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