It’s been a while since I’ve covered umpire performance in a game, but I decided what better time to review the performance of our umpires than the playoffs. Last night’s divisional series game between the New York Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles has some differing opinions about how well home plate umpire Tony Randazzo did calling the game, depending on who you ask of course.
A part of the game of baseball is that the home plate umpire is not always going to be perfect, that much is as certain as there’s only going to be one winner, but they do strive to be consistent. For those of you who were watching the game on television and simultaneously tweeting about it, or just following others on twitter who were tweeting about it (I was doing both), then you may have noticed an abundance of tweets concerning the strikezone last night.
Before we dive into the strikezone and how many calls Randazzo may or may not have missed, here are some bits and pieces of information about him as well as a scouting report done by Andy Goldblatt.
Name: Tony Randazzo
Uniform number: 11
Age: 47
Height/weight: 6-foot-2, 225 pounds
First year as MLB umpire: 1999
Total MLB games worked through 2011: 1,489 (home plate: 376)
Previous experience: New York-Penn League, Florida State League, Texas League, Arizona Fall League, American Association, Pacific Coast League
Career ejections through 2011: 26
No-hitters called: None
Over/under record (1999-2011): 165-158
Hated in: Denver, Boston
Notable alleged blown calls: Red Sox-A’s, June 4, 2011; Cubs-Tigers, June 11, 2012; Yankees-Pirates, June 15, 2005.
Claim to fame: For getting heckled by Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda as a minor league umpire in the early ’90s.
Scouting report from Major League Umpires’ Performance, 2007-2010, by Andy Goldblatt:
There’s a considerable gap between what the data suggest about Randazzo and what players and managers say about him. The data suggest he has a very large strike zone tempered by a reluctance to call strike three and is more patient than the average umpire in arguments. Stories from players and managers suggest that Randazzo has a tight, sometimes arbitrary strike zone and an aggressive attitude.
What I find most interesting about the scouting report done on Randazzo from last season is that the data I’m looking at also suggests that he has somewhat of a large strikezone, especially on borderline pitches that are low, and watching the game last night did show me that Randazzo does have a bit of patience when dealing with players displaying their ‘curiosity’ over certain calls. It seems that much of the outcry over his strikezone last night likely had more to do with the specific situations in which he was calling borderline strikes and balls as opposed to him having a legitimately, and obviously, bad strikezone.
With all of that said, here are the numbers from last night’s game and how Randazzo did calling the game.
There were a total of 306 pitches thrown in the game last night, 182 by the Orioles and 124 by the Yankees, with 18 total hits collected and eight combined walks (seven allowed by the Orioles). The way I calculate an umpire’s performance, at least one aspect of it anyway, is on the number of missed calls an umpire has relative to the total number of chances that umpire has throughout the game.
How we figure that out is we take the total number of pitches thrown and subtract the total number of hits, walks, swinging strikes, in play outs, and foul balls. That leaves us with the total number of chances an umpire had to make a call during the game. In last night’s game Randazzo had a total of 166 chances to make call behind the plate on balls and strikes.
Of those 166 chances he missed approximately 14 (8.43%) of those calls (pitches called either balls or strikes that appear to have been incorrect). That’s actually a pretty good rate for an umpire and I consider anything to be under 10 percent a pretty successful night for the men behind the plate.
Now that we’ve established that Randazzo actually did a pretty good job calling balls and strikes relative to the total number of chances he had to make a call behind the plate, let’s take a look at where these calls were at on the fastmap strikezone chart (courtesy of Brooksbaseball.net).
You can see that Randazzo was calling pitches strikes that appear to be a little low, below the strikezone, and calling pitches balls that were a bit outside the strikezone on the inner and outer edges. What we can take away from this is that he was at least consistent with his calls – calling the low, just below the strikezone, strikes and calling pitches balls that may have caught the outer edges of the plate. He wasn’t making calls against one team over the other either as it appears, at first glance at least, that the two teams pretty much split the difference between the missed calls (all 14 of them) straight down the middle with approximately seven missed for and against each team.
It’s easy to call out the umpires, or officials of any major sport, for a poor performance when you feel that your team is getting squeezed or you believe that one team is getting certain calls that the other team is not. That wasn’t exactly the case last night and I’ll admit that it’s easy for us, as fans, to get caught up in the moment when we have a lot riding on a particular matchup or game. Thankfully with access to data like this it allows us to gain a little perspective on it all – albeit, after the fact.
