Tag Archives: Robby the Umpbot

Max the Knife: Let Robby the Umpbot rank the umps

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Max Scherzer

“We need to rank the umpires . . . and talk about relegating (the bottom ten percent) to the minor leagues.”—Max Scherzer.

Hunter Wendelstedt’s toss of Yankee manager Aaron Boone Monday has now been deemed “a bad ejection,” according to SNY’s Andy Martino, citing an unnamed source. “Bad ejection?” How about unwarranted? How about irresponsible? How about letting reputation overrule the moment erroneously?

And, how about Max Scherzer suggesting a very good way to start holding umpires better accountable for such unwarranted, irresponsible errors?

Nobody with eyes to see and ears to hear should have cared two pins that Boone had 34 previous ejections plus a reputation for being a bit on the whiny side. Boone kept his  mouth tight shut following an early warning over a beef involving a hit batsman on a low pitch, but a blue-shirted fan seated behind the Yankee dugout barked and Wendelstedt decided Boone should get the bite.

Wendestedt not only ejected a manager erroneously but doubled down with one of the most mealymouth explanations you’re liable to hear from anyone among the people who are supposed to be the proverbial adults in the room:

This isn’t my first ejection. In the entirety of my career, I have never ejected a player or a manager for something a fan has said. I understand that’s going to be part of a story or something like that because that’s what Aaron was portraying. I heard something come from the far end of the dugout, had nothing to do with his area but he’s the manager of the Yankees. So he’s the one that had to go.

Imagine parents hearing one of their children call them an obscene name while in another’s bedroom, then deciding the child whose bedroom it is should be grounded a week instead of the pottymouth. That’s what Wendelstedt’s ejection was, and the crime didn’t happen from the Yankee dugout but behind it.

The only thing MLB government intends to do, Martino observed, is add the Boone ejection to Wendelstedt’s evaluation for game management. Seasonal evaluations have impacts on whether umpires get plum assignments such as leading crews, working All-Star Games, and working postseasons.

Wendelstedt isn’t a crew chief despite being a major league ump for 28 years. (He works today on Marvin Hudson’s ump crew.) He hasn’t worked an All-Star Game since 2011; he hasn’t worked a postseason series since the 2018 National League Championship Series. You might consider thirteen years since his last All-Star game and eight since his last postseason assignment punishment enough.

But players, coaches, managers are subject to prompt accountability for their misbehaviours. They get fined and/or suspended for bad arguments on the field and MLB government can’t wait to make those punishments public. Blocking an errant ump from the postseason may seem like punishment to you, but how much damage might his regular-season mistakes and doubling down on mealymouth excuses for them have wreaked upon a pennant race?

On 26 July 2011, plate ump Jerry Meals ruled incorrectly that the Braves’ Julio Lugo was safe at the plate in the bottom of the nineteenth on 26 July 2011. Pirates catcher Michael McKenry tagged him out three feet from the plate, and you can see McKenry make the tag right before Lugo stepped on the plate.

Meals apologised profusely after the game and the day after. (He also incurred death threats against his wife and children.) His public acknowledgement of his mistake may have saved his hide; he got to work a 2011 NL division series and was promoted to crew chief in 2015, a rank he held before his retirement in 2022.

But that call cost the Pirates a win after a very long night and helped knock the wind out of their pennant race sails. They were a game out of first in the National League Central when that game ended. They split the next two games with the Braves before hitting a ten-game losing streak, losing fourteen of their next sixteen, and falling to fourth in the division to stay.

There are and have been those umps such as Meals who hold themselves accountable for their mistakes. Umps such as also-retired Jim Joyce and Tim Welke, and still-working Chad Fairchild. Umps such as the late Don Denkinger, who owned up to his infamous 1985 World Series mistake and also came out strong for replay.

Umps such as Gabe Morales, who seemed itching to apologise for blowing the call—when plate ump Doug Eddings asked for help on Wilmer Flores’s check swing, bottom of the ninth, two out and a man on first, the Giants down one run, Game Five of a 2021 NLDS riddled with dubious calls—for game, set, match, and early winter for the Giants. We’ll never know if Flores would have risen to the occasion on 1-2, whether against Max Scherzer or Marvin the Martian, but he should have the chance to try.

What to do about the Wendelstedts? About the Angel Hernandezes, Laz Diazes, C.B. Bucknors? Now pitching on a rehab assignment at Round Rock for the Rangers, Scherzer himself has a thought. A very good one. You’re afraid of Robby the Umpbot? Max the Knife says not so fast, Robby might actually do us a huge favour if he’s deployed properly and baseball government doesn’t screw his pooch:

We need to rank the umpires. Let the electronic strike zone rank the umpires. We need to have a conversation about the bottom—let’s call it 10%, whatever you want to declare the bottom is—and talk about relegating those umpires to the minor leagues.

Scherzer’s said something I’ve argued before. Remember: relegating low-ranking, low-performing umpires to the minors for retraining is precisely what the Korean Baseball Organisation does. If MLB’s government can’t get the World Umpires Association to sit down and talk seriously and reasonably about umpire accountability without Robby the Umpbot, maybe the point that many umps aren’t exactly paranoid about Robby’s eventual advent offers a way to get it without undermining umps or bruising egos too seriously.

Accountability is an absolute must. Max the Knife’s thought put into play would be a far better look than leaving the Wendelstedts excuses to double down on their most grievous errors and verbal diarrhea to follow, or leaving baseball’s government excuses to continue letting them get away with it.

Robby the Umpbot steps closer to the Show

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Ángel Hernández

Ángel Hernández, Exhibit A on behalf of Robby the Umpbot’s eventual major league advent.

Almost two years ago, when the automated strike zone was on the threshold of its tryout in the low-A level Southeast League, you could hear the so-called traditionalists waver between tears of sorrow and tears of rage. Wait until they hear Robby the Umpbot is going to get a tryout behind the plate at the AAA level this year—in all thirty parks across the Pacific Coast League and the International league.

If they haven’t already, they’re liable to palpitate, have kittens, scream themselves into strokes, or plot to storm the baseball commissioner’s office. There are plenty of reasons to wish Rob Manfred’s ouster. This isn’t one of them.

First, let’s look at how it’s going to operate in the AAA leagues. Half will be full Robbies to call every pitch with earpieces relaying the calls to the plate umpire. Half will operate similar to tennis’s challenge system: each team receives three pitch call challenges a game—the batter, the pitcher, or the catcher can call for them—and, if Robby upholds the challenge, the challenging team won’t lose the rest of its game challenges.

And to think Robby will now be one step up from the Show itself.

When Robby prepared for his Southeast League premiere, the trad thunderings went along the line of one I quoted from an online baseball forum: “The game is played by humans . . . why take away one of the most human elements of the game???” That’s what makes it beautiful.”

Well, now. The beautiful human element (a phrase once uttered by Hall of Fame manager Joe Torre, when he was the commissioner’s top cop, and that was only uttered about replay) leaves too little room for getting it right, particularly when postseason advance or maybe even a World Series championship is on the line squarely enough.

There were bugs to work out of the technology during that Southeast League tryout. There may yet be bugs to work out during its Triple-A tryout this year. But work them out baseball must, because that beautiful human element is still only too human, too prone to error, and too little held properly accountable. Including baseball’s government, which seems to believe the human element’s accountability and competence are consummations devoutly to be avoided.

It’s not impossible to think that the Manfred regime glommed onto Robby the Umpbot not because he might tend to get the calls right but because the regime has a lazy side powerful enough to reject holding umpires as accountable as any other baseball employee as . . . what? Too intrusive? Too troublesome? Too likely to launch a war with a Major League Baseball Umpires Association that was born of such a war in the first place?

The regime had no trouble launching a war against the players with last winter’s lockout. Does the regime think the umpires are as gods? Does it remember nobody comes to the ballpark to see the umpires? Does it pine for the so-called good old days when skirmishes between even Hall of Fame managers behaving like toddlers over umpires behaving like judicial tyrants were must-see television?

(That little [expletive] called me names that would get a man killed in other places, and that was on days I didn’t throw him out.—Steve Palermo, a mild-mannered and respected umpire, to say nothing of courageous, about Earl Weaver, Hall of Fame manager who was as mild-mannered as a saltwater crocodile. There was even a time when a Baltimore-area Oldsmobile dealership used a Weaver tirade as a television commercial. Charming.)

That beautiful human element still insists, too much of the time, that the strike zone is whatever the umpire says it is, Rule 2.0 be damned. At least, they do until they see the latest mischief Ángel Hernández, Laz Diaz, and Doug Eddings commit. There’s perverse pleasure in abusing the Hernándezes, Diazes, Eddingses, and their like for their errors. “Kill the ump!” has yet to become an unpopular chant.

The worst umpiring jobs are done behind the plate. Last season, the median major league umpire averaged 95 percent correct pitch calls. While you may think that a sterling record, keep in mind that a 95 average might get you a medical school scholarship but a five percent error rate in the operating theater might get you a malpractise suit.

Within that blown five percent might be and has been, often enough and too often for comfort, the blown call that turned a key pennant race game, a postseason series, or the World Series, all the wrong way around. Very few umpires, still, own up when they blow it. Chad Fairchild, now-retired Jim Joyce, Jerry Meals, and long-retired Tim Welke are only four such exceptions.

EV Analytics, a statistical company whose work includes rating and ranking sports officiating, says Hernández and Diaz are considered “neutral” umpires, not disposed excessively toward either pitchers or batters: they’re equal opportunity butchers. EVA also considers Eddings among pitchers’ best friends for butchery behind the plate.

Sam Fels, a Deadspin baseball writer who is on board with Robby the Umpbot’s advent, has one concern, that about whether “cantankerous umps” such as Hernández or Eddings respond when challenged during any game: “No chance they’ll hold a grudge, right? Or start their own argument with a batter or catcher after having their authority and precision questioned?” It might be mad fun to see whether the Replay Command Center  sends them to the showers.