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WSJ asks: Are younger umpires better?


TheRockawayKid
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I leave this only for all of you to read and dissect as you wish, but here's what the Journal has to say about someone who did a study on MLB umpires: 

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Now Williams wonders if that stereotype needs to change. He and a team of graduate students recently completed a study that examined the accuracy of Major League Baseball umpires on ball/strike calls from 2008 through 2018, a data set encompassing nearly four million pitches. The results showed that when it comes to adjudicating the strike zone, younger umpires fare far better than their older counterparts.

Yet in the most important games of the season, MLB still prefers experience, with the seven umps deployed in the 2018 World Series having an average age of about 53. Crew chief honors went to Ted Barrett, a 53-year-old with 22 years of major-league service time. He ranked at the bottom of last season’s umpire standings according to Williams’s research.

 

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Williams focused on ball/strike calls because of the amount of data available and the intense fan interest in that realm. While managers can challenge most rulings on the field, balls and strikes remain the sole purview of the umpire stationed behind the plate.

Williams and his colleagues used information from PitchF/X and Statcast, which went online league-wide in 2015, to track how often umpires disagreed with the technology. The findings left little doubt about the aging curve: The worst 10 umpires by this measure over the 11-season sample had an average age of 56 and more than 20 years of experience. Jerry Layne, a 60-year-old with 30 years of service time, finished last, followed by Rob Drake (49) and Mike Winters (60).

Meanwhile, the best 10 umps had considerably less experience, averaging just six years on the job and about 38 years of age. Mark Wegner led the pack (47-years-old), followed by Triple-A fill-in John Libka (31) and Will Little (35). No new umpire was promoted to the MLB staff this season, though one was added last year and four the year before that. The average full-time ump has around 16 years of experience.

 

 
One possible explanation came from Jim Evans, who noted that the "older" umpires called their strike zone, and weren't bound by technology. The study also didn't focus on things like overturn rates, field positioning and only touched briefly on game management. And, of course, the article has nothing to say about Joe West's amazing postseason performance last year during the ALCS. Your thoughts everyone? 

 

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It's behind a paywall but if it is the Boston University one then the first issue I have is that it is unclear what strike zone they used in their analysis, in other articles I have seen it mentioned that they used a standardized strike zone which would both ease the data documentation, analysis, and comparison but would create severe validity issues as you would be introducing a known source of error since you are not accounting for the individual differences in strike zones for each MLB player. Unfortunately the actual article does not include how they determined the strike zone other than "Called pitches and strike zone overlay were populated from Baseball Savant, Pitch F/X (2008-16), and Statcast data (2017-18)." which does not inform me of whether they used a standardized strike zone or not.

Listed is the link to the original study: https://www.bu.edu/today/2019/mlb-umpires-strike-zone-accuracy/

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