Brandon Brown
Calls to hit the ball are one of baseball’s most reliable sources of consternation for players, managers and fans. Perceptions aside, big league umpires generally do a very good job of making accurate calls. However, home plater umpires don’t get every call right, and as pitchers continue to gain speed and accurate late movements on their offerings and catchers continue to work on their framing skills in an effort to fool the umpire, the task Determining whether a given pitch is in or out of the strike zone is more challenging than ever. Maybe it’s too challenging.
From the start of the 2023 season to the current date (i.e., when league-wide average fastball velocity reached 94 mph for the first time on record), plate umpires have connected on 92.7% of ball strikes. From the looks of it, that’s a pretty high number, but the reality is that a large number of called balls and hits are obvious decisions, clearly in or out of the zone, even to the untrained eye. Now consider:
- According to data from TruMedia, plate umpires on pitches classified as “corners” have had a 58.5% ball striking accuracy rate since the start of the 2023 season.
- When a pitch is in the corner and there are two hits on the batter, that accuracy rate drops to 45.9%.
To restate the latter for proper emphasis, a pitch into the margins that the batter plays with two strikes will likely be called incorrectly by the umpire. And when do we add leverage into the mix? In high-leverage or clutch situations, referees receive corner calls with two correct hits only 43.2% of the time. It’s easy to understand, given the stakes of these moments, why such missed calls get lodged in the hitter or pitcher’s head and affect their perceptions of the umpire’s competence. To be fair, these percentages are not adjusted and “on the corners” constitute a narrow swath of the area. In full context, getting almost half of the statements right is truly an achievement, given the evolution of sales pitches these days. Still, there is a right/wrong nature to this, and this must be recognized.
In honor of all of these realities, the automated ball striking system (ABS) is currently in use at the Triple-A and High-A levels of the minor leagues, and the expectation is that some form of ABS system will eventually make its way into the higher level, perhaps through a challenge-based device. This, however, is not a certainty, given the interests in MLB and how different their views on the prudence and viability of an ABS system may be. So what happens in the meantime?
Most likely nothing happens in the meantime, which means that the human eye will continue to be responsible for such crucial judgments. On Friday, however, Minnesota Twins shortstop Carlos Correa, frustrated by ball-hitting decisions during his team’s loss to the Guardians, voiced an idea to provide a bridge to the (possible) eventual arrival of ABS system in the majors. Via Tom Withers of the Associated Press, Correa said:
“I feel like pitchers are too nasty right now for umpires to see. I feel like if the refs knew what was coming and had a Pitchcom (communication device), they would make calls a lot better.
“It’s really hard for them to just be able to call pitches, especially the way catchers are framing them these days. If they had a device where it says slider and they were anticipating the slider and they knew where it should start and land for that to be a strike, then we would get a lot of calls.
“But the fact that they are there blind is very difficult. I just think their job is too difficult for me to be hard on them. Sometimes I get calls, sometimes I don’t and you move on.”
Pitchcom is the audio device through which catchers and pitchers relay pitch calls during a plate appearance. The goal is to eliminate the need for traditional hand signals by the catcher and thus reduce the possibility of signal stealing by the opposition. As Correa suggests, home plate umpires could listen and theoretically prepare for what’s coming from a mental and perhaps visual standpoint. For what it’s worth, Correa isn’t the first to float such an idea. The genesis of the “referees get Pitchcom headphones” idea appears to be a 2023 episode of the Effectively Wild podcast on FanGraphs.
Would this help measurably, as Correa believes? Or would it make no real difference in umpires’ ability to correctly call contemporary pitches? Or would knowing the type of pitch in advance somehow sway the umpire in one direction or another? As with any new idea or innovation, the risk of unintended consequences is real.
Perhaps the idea deserves serious consideration from the relevant powers of the league and the referees themselves. Of course, it would be the latter who would have the best idea of whether access to Pitchcom could improve the situation. To repeat, though, the status quo will likely remain until the league moves to an ABS system. This means more frustrations and, according to the numbers, more missed calls at crucial moments.
