ESPN.com–Michael Young out on strikes
It turned out not to be an important AB, but in the eighth inning last night Michael Young came up and worked the count full. The payoff pitch was clearly many inches off the plate. Young started to throw his bat toward the dugout, in order to march to first base, but was instead called out.
ESPN showed that doojiggy computer graphic that shows where the ball is when it reaches home plate, and it showed the ball well outside. They also showed the shot from the high-home camera, which also clearly placed the ball well off the plate.
The call was so bad that the youngster Young actually turned to the umpire and talked to him heatedly, though he didn’t show him up and he didn’t get tossed. It did no immediate good, of course, and instead of Texas having two men on with one out, they had one man on with two outs, a substantial difference.
The point here isn’t that an umpire blew a call, that happens, but that we appear to have technology now that can pretty reliably call balls and strikes. Of course the umps are resistent to this technology. It threatens their jobs.
As we learn more and more about how the game of baseball works, it becomes more and more clear that the game turns on balls and strikes, and that the count confers a crucial advantage to either the pitcher or hitter. At some point it’s not going to be good enough to have the umpires get it right 85% of the time, or even 95%, or to bring their own idiosyncracies to the calling of a game.
In the not too distant future, we’ll still have a need for umps, I just don’t think we’ll need them calling balls and strikes.