Inexperienced umpires hurt baseball's product
On Sunday afternoon, the Philadelphia Phillies hosted the Minnesota Twins in the final game of an important series for both teams. Minnesota won, 3-0, increasing their lead on Cleveland to 4.5 games in the American League Central division. Despite the loss, Philadelphia remains in the National League's first wild-card spot.
The game was marred by two questionable calls made by home-plate umpire Alex MacKay, both of which resulted in ejections. The first came in the bottom of the seventh inning when Alec Bohm was called out on strikes on an inside 3-2 pitch. The Phillies had the bases loaded with two outs trailing 2-0, and a walk would have scored a run.
In the Phillies' next at-bat, Bryce Harper led off the bottom of the eighth and was called out on an outside pitch. Manager Rob Thomson intervened to avoid the risk of Harper getting tossed as well.
According to Ump Scorecards, a site which logs and audits the performance of major-league umpires, Sunday's game was only the 19th home-plate umpiring appearance of Alex MacKay's brief career. By comparison, 58 umpires have called balls and strikes in at least 20 games just this season.
The other three umpires for Sunday's game - Bruce Dreckman, Stu Scheurwater and Malachi Moore - have combined to call balls and strikes for 878 games, based on data from Ump Scorecards and Retrosheet. Dreckman accounts for 594 of those games, having umpired since 1996.
In June, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said that it was unlikely that a robotic umpiring system to call balls and strikes would debut by 2024. Still, it's something that Manfred clearly wants to see happen. With the potential of such a change looming, one would think that the current umpires would be out to prove that they can still get the job done. Instead, Sunday's crucial game between two playoff hopefuls was impacted by an umpire with the least experience among the game's crew.
It's true that umpires need their reps just like players do, but doing so in a game and a situation with such high stakes is a disservice to baseball fans. The Oakland Athletics played the Washington Nationals over the weekend in a series with no playoff implications.
Wouldn't that have been a better environment for Alex MacKay to practice his craft?
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