PITCHf/x, QuesTec, and HBO

By Guest
Updated: May 31, 2012

This guest post was written by C. Sven Jenkins

PITCHf/x, QuesTec, and HBO

Back in 2002 I met umpire Mark Hirschbeck. He informed me that even though baseball used QuesTec to rate umpires, the information from the findings would never be knowledge for the entire baseball world to see.

Hirschbeck, arguing with Scott Brosius

QuesTec was used in MLB from 2001-2008. Since 2009, the grading of umpires has been done with a system invented by Sportvision called Zone Evaluation.

Since 2007, baseball has made Sportvision’s PITCHf/x available to the public, and at Brooks Baseball you can look up the strikezone maps for every game played since then.

Personally, I made up my own number for evaluation of umpires. I call it Umpire Strikezone Score (USS). It is calculated by counting all the ball and strike calls made, and then giving a percentage of correct calls for each umpire. The average grade score has been about 89% in the more than 400 games I have recorded.

Recently I spoke with a producer from HBO Real Sports. He had read some of my articles at 60ft6in and thought my method was too generous to each umpire’s score.

He suggested that I only count the pitches that were close to the plate, and eliminate the obvious calls.

Using this advice I changed my data, by eliminating pitches more than six inches outside the strikezone, and also eliminating strikes in the middle of the strikezone. Overall, this changes the numbers in most games, dropping the % of correct calls by nearly 8%. Now I call it Umpire Strikezone Scores on Close Calls (USSCC).

In the game umpired by Brian Gorman between Boston and Baltimore on May 23, the numbers show a very incompetent umpire whenever a left-handed batter was at the plate.

Using the new parameters, there were only 48 Close Call pitches to left-handed batters that Gorman had to make. He called 12 balls incorrectly as strikes, and seven strikes he called incorrectly as balls. He was wrong 19 out of 47. His USS for Close Calls was .5957. Less than 60%! Somebody should be looking at these numbers.

(Green = called balls / Red = called strikes / thick black box is actual strikezone / inner and out boxes represent the 6-inch markers)

Even using my original method, Gorman missed 19 out of 82 pitches, for a mark .7683.

As the HBO producer told me, “Every fan could sit in the park and use their phone to follow Gameday data, and watch where every pitch crosses the plate, if they wanted to do so during the game.”

However, those playing the game and those umpiring can’t see this data during the game. Also, MLB will not permit teams to show these replays on any giant screen in the park.

Why is baseball so afraid to show the players and the umpires where every pitch is?

Baseball started using strikezone technology in 2001, and more than a decade later, nobody but a select chosen few really look at these numbers.

Do you think home plate umpires have improved since 2001?

When you look at the close calls, it doesn’t look like things have improved at all.