Home-Plate Umpires Have Favored Twins Opponents in 2023 Playoffs

1 hour ago, Aggies7 said:

Consistency is at least as important as accuracy 

Both are important, and robo umps are better at both than humans. Moreover, humans will never experience an improvement in performance and robo umps will.

1 hour ago, Mike Sixel said:

See tennis....

This, to me, is possibly the best argument.  I'm not certain how many on here regularly watch tennis, but the line calls in tennis are the closest comparison to ball-strike calls that MLB umps are forced to make.

These calls are impossible to get consistently correct by utilizing the human eye.  The margins are just too fine.  Because of this, participants in both sports argue about calls on the margins.

With the move to robo umps in tennis, the arguments have almost entirely ceased.  Players (and fans) tend to accept the calls as shown on the camera replay, even when a ball is in or out by a fraction of an inch.  It's hard to argue with a camera.  The era of John McEnroe going off on a chair ump is over.

The exception is at Wimbledon, which so far has stayed with human calls, while all of the other major tournaments have switched.  And Wimbledon is now being rather heavily criticized for this decision, because the new system works so well at the other tournaments..

40 minutes ago, Riverbrian said:

However, pitch number two to Dozier made the count 1-1. It didn't end the AB. Which is what should have happened to Didi. 

You are right... we can do this all day. And that's the point. It takes a lot of moments to do this all day and that's the problem.

I get your point and in this instance it was not apples to apples - you're 100% right.  

On the last sentence - is it actually a problem?  Fans like talking about sports, and arguing about strategy, lineups, calls, etc - it's all part of it.  Sports are messy and unpredictable and that's why they're fun.  If everything always goes according to plan and the human element gets diminished I think the entertainment value suffers.  

And believe me, implementing robo umps won't give fans hours of their time back - they'll have no problem finding things to argue about.  Get ready for complaining about robo strike zones, software issues, conspiracy theories about hardware that failed at an inconvenient time... it'll never end...

11 minutes ago, Road trip said:

This, to me, is possibly the best argument.  I'm not certain how many on here regularly watch tennis, but the line calls in tennis are the closest comparison to ball-strike calls that MLB umps are forced to make.

I disagree.  Where a ball hits relative to a clearly marked line is simply a manner of camera resolution.  The strike zone is not a clearly marked line.  It is invisible, and dependent on the size of each hitter and the hitter's stance.  Apples and oranges.  

8 minutes ago, chpettit19 said:

I don't think those first 2 sentences are true. Is it true for some fans? Sure. But, I think, overall, most fans just want the calls to be right so the game is decided by the players, and not the refs/umps/whatever. 

If this was the case TD would have at least 1 article complaining about calls that went the Twins way and calling for "fairness".  If you can find one please pass it along.  

10 minutes ago, chpettit19 said:

And it's not about benefitting certain teams at the expense of others over years, or even multiple games. It's about benefitting one team over another in each individual game

And over time it evens out. 

11 minutes ago, chpettit19 said:

The leagues keep expanding replay because they are getting more calls right

Ask any NFL fan if the refs get everything right even with replay.  I'm guessing not a single one will say yes.  It's actually the opposite. When replay first came up the league said "subjective calls like pass interference will never be reviewed."  One bad call in a playoff game and now suddenly it's reviewable.  Review has so complicated football that fans can't even tell you what a catch is, and it has slowed down games dramatically.  And it has yet to accomplish the one and only thing is was intended to accomplish: "getting all the calls right".  

The ump last night was excellent. If I was mlb I would provide the box they use to grade umpires to all the tv networks as the boxes are different. I’m sure several pitches would be graded differently. Plus mlb allow a small buffer zone where either call is deemed acceptable. I’m not saying umpiring isn’t bad but it may be less bad than what we see. By allowing this difference they are denigrating their own product. 

13 minutes ago, USAFChief said:

1. The premise of the article being based on "umpire score cards" off Twitter is questionable at best. 

There's an assumption of validity here that I don't think is warranted. It's not official and is based on pretty questionable assumptions.

The reason I favor robo umps has nothing to do with Twitter-based scorecards, which I think are indeed based on questionable assumptions. I favor them because they do a statistically significantly better job than humans at calling strikes according to the strike zone as specified in the official rules of the game.

16 minutes ago, USAFChief said:

2. On the larger subject of an automated strike zone, it's inevitable. It's coming.

Personally, I don't think that's a good thing, but I realize I'm probably in a minority of fans with that opinion. I doubt it'll be much better, and I worry it'll change the game in subtle but negative ways.

Before this season I felt the same way about the pitch clock and related rules, although I didn't think the changes would be subtle. I now feel that the impact of those rule changes has been overwhelmingly positive. When this change is implemented I'm confident that you will similarly admit you were wrong, and I'm confident about that in two ways: one, that the change will be overwhelmingly positive and, two, that you will be man enough to accept and embrace the overwhelming positivity of the change.

1 hour ago, Nine of twelve said:

Before this season I felt the same way about the pitch clock and related rules, although I didn't think the changes would be subtle. I now feel that the impact of those rule changes has been overwhelmingly positive.

The pitch clock and not allowing the batters to take a walk-about every pitch made the game shorter and not annoying hour longer than they should be; not even remotely related to an electric computer umpire.

Kepler wishes we had the robo ump. Never would have called strike 3 on the ball inches inside when Lewis had 2nd base stolen. Key spot.

7 hours ago, RickOShea said:

I believe the strike zone is calibrated by the stance the batter uses, not solely on his height.

It starts at the knees. Ends where ever. Used to be the letters although the high strike has been gone for some time. And the stance is not supposed to have anything to do with the strike zone. 

18 minutes ago, USAFChief said:

False.

The strike zone is defined by when the batter is in his stance.

Midpoint between  shoulders and top of pants to a point just below the kneecaps.

 

https://www.mlb.com/glossary/rules/strike-zone

Vertical stance yes. But I'm talking about a hunched over stance Ala Ricky Henderson 

10 hours ago, FlyingFinn said:

Bring on the robo ump strike/ball calls. In a game of inches and with teams so close, favoring veterans or teams must end. We have the technology now to make the game more fair.

Yep.  The question is not if the robo ump is perfected, the question is whether it is better than we now have.  

Hitters will arrive at the stadium knowing what the strike zone will be that day.  Pitchers won't have to nibble the edges to find out.  Most importantly, catchers won't be yanking pitches out of the zone to fool the robot.  

The sooner the better.  

8 hours ago, chpettit19 said:

I don't think those first 2 sentences are true. Is it true for some fans? Sure. But, I think, overall, most fans just want the calls to be right so the game is decided by the players, and not the refs/umps/whatever. 

And it's not about benefitting certain teams at the expense of others over years, or even multiple games. It's about benefitting one team over another in each individual game. "The NFL wants the Chiefs to win so they get more calls" type arguments come from a very small, but often very loud, segment of the population. Arguing against those people is pointless. There's no argument that can be made that missed calls are balanced between the teams in each game, though. That simply isn't true. 1 team always gets the benefit in each particular game. Whether from bad calls, missed calls, or a combination of both. Some of us just want to take as much of that out of the equation as possible. And often time the advantage is very small, and not even worth really discussing.

You'll never find me claiming the refs/umps/whoever cost a team a game. But pretending that one team doesn't benefit more than another in any given game is ignoring reality. And when you get into the playoffs that disparity is naturally looked at more closely. Especially in a sport like football where 1 game not going your way ends your season. Or game 3/5/7 in a series where you know 1 team is going home at the end of the game.

I don't think I agree with your layout of the replay timeline in sports, either. The leagues expand replay after it does work, not after it doesn't. I can't think of 1 league that implemented it, watched it fail, and said "the answer is more replay!" The NFL tried to replay certain penalty calls and stopped after it clearly didn't work. MLB started with just fair/foul replay, found success, and expanded to calls on the bases, etc. The leagues keep expanding replay because they are getting more calls right. Which seems like a pretty logical process to me.

Indeed, important calls in any game almost never even out; one team inevitably suffers more from bad calls than the other, so fairness should be sought as much as can possibly expected. Kepler got called out on a pitch that was outside for the final out of today's game. He either walks there or strikeouts. The Twins are down by one with Correa coming up. Would he drive Kepler in? We'll never know the answer to that question because it was taken from us by the umpire.

13 hours ago, RpR said:

The pitch clock and not allowing the batters to take a walk-about every pitch made the game shorter and not annoying hour longer than they should be; not even remotely related to an electric computer umpire.

I think most people understood my point but I apologize for not making it clear enough for you to understand. I wasn't trying to say the two issues are related. They are not. My point is that I originally didn't like the pitch clock rules but after seeing the positive effect they had on the game I changed my mind. Now I think the rule change was good. And I think the same thing will happen for many people who currently don't want robo umps.

I did not look up the scorecard for last night's game, but there was some called strikes well outside the zone against the Twins.  The fact it was a 1 run game each called strike well outside the zone is an issue.  I really hope we get at minimum a challenge system.  Julien gets burned so much taking pitches in off the plate that get called for strikes, so often strike 3 too.  That has to be so frustrating for a hitter, you know you take a ball and get called out, then you get to see that it was confirmed the ump was wrong, but you get nothing but a K for it. I am not saying the Twins did not get some in their favor, but as the score card indicates, more important ones went against the Twins. 

The first called strike against Lewis was huge with the bases loaded in game 3.  Falling behind 1-0 instead of up 0-1 for a pitcher with bases loaded is huge.  Even more so for Mr. Grand Slam.

Have some good at bats and stop striking out half the time and your chances of winning are much better. That trend can’t be blamed on the umpires. That said, thankfully Phil Cuzzi and Angel Hernandez weren’t working!