Baseball Musings: Jones on the Umps

September 05, 2007

Jones on the Umps

Chipper Jones called for Questec at Turner Field last night. He was upset about poor umpiring when he was at the plate:

"The first pitch to me with the bases loaded was in my batter's box, inside," Jones told reporters after the game. "Now you tell me how I'm supposed to hit that. We have to get Questec here in this ballpark. We've got to. Umpires have got to be held accountable. That's Little League World Series stuff right there."
...

"It's a joke," Jones said. "I'm tired of it. And baseball can fine me whatever they want. I do not care. Somebody's got to say something. I've got more walks than strikeouts in my career -- I know what a strike looks like."

At this point, Questec appears to do a lot more good than harm. It's really time to put it (or a system like it) in every ballpark.

Update: Michael Lerra send this shot from MLB GameDay, showing Chipper is upset about nothing:

I'd like to see video of the pitch, if anyone can find it on the Internet. Also, I'm not sure why he's complaining if he ended up walking in the plate appearance anyway.

Posted by David Pinto at 10:19 AM | Umpires | TrackBack (0)

Comments

Jayson Stark (on ESPN Radio this morning) said that Chipper's outburst reflects a fairly broad dissatisfaction with the quality of umpiring this year -- especially on balls and strikes. He also said there's a widespread feeling that umpires' attitudes are out of control.

With a player of Chipper's stature going public, it'll be interesting to see if others come forth -- and if MLB takes any remedial action. If this was the NFL, something would be done. With Bud Selig, the likely response is, well, nothing.

Posted by: jvwalt at September 5, 2007 10:39 AM

Fortunately, we have the internet and MLB.com's fantastic gameday data to take a look at his claim. From the gameday camera, it looks like the first pitch just barely caught the black of the plate. I can see how Chipper might think it was a ball, but the data shows it to be a borderline pitch. Nothing to get all worked up about.

Posted by: Mike at September 5, 2007 10:48 AM

i'll agree about ump's attitudes. it seems to me like a lot of ump's are looking for excuses to get into it with players and managers.

Posted by: amos at September 5, 2007 11:02 AM

Is the gameday pitch chart accurate? Esepcially for those parks without Questec? From my experience it has often been nowhere close.

I saw the pitch that Jones' is talking about - it was not in the strike zone, and it was pretty much unhittable.

Posted by: dave at September 5, 2007 11:36 AM

You can watch the video on mlb.com.

Go here

You can watch the entire game - the pitch he is talking about it is right at 2:12 in the game (at least in the 400K version)

Posted by: dave at September 5, 2007 11:44 AM

There was another at bat that Chipper jones was not thrilled about. And as a result he had to swing and when I say swing I mean lunge at a ball on the out side of the zone when he was batting as a righty. The first pitch was call4ed a strike and was outside of the zone and wasn't close

check out the pick:

http://img508.imageshack.us/my.php?image=chipatlfg0.png

Posted by: Len at September 5, 2007 11:56 AM

I believe gameday is completely separate from questec. One interesting aspect of it is that they calibrate the strike zone for each batter. So while Questec, I think, uses a standard rectangle, gameday will have a vastly different strike zone for Eckstein and Sexson.

Nice pic Len - in that AB, there was an outside strike which led Chipper to lunge at a slightly more outside strike. I think he has a much better case there. Perhaps gameday malfunctioned on the pitch in the screengrab I sent to David, but who knows.

Posted by: Mike at September 5, 2007 12:49 PM

Umpiring this year has been absolutely atrocious. The outcome of almost every game I've watched this year has been directly affected by umpires being unable to correctly call balls and strikes, and often it's been flat out blatant. For instance, in the game that peavy pitched against STL in san diego this year, he was getting 6-8 inches on both sides of the plate; unhittable pitches were being called strikes. It was bad enough that I went to the game the next night and Padres fans were talking about how bad the zone was.

Pujols complained about the strike zone early in the season, and since then he's not been given a fair strike zone. A lot of the "pujols is not having a good season" comes from the fact that he was called out on strikes on pitches that were not even borderline strikes at least a dozen times- and he's a guy who, like chipper, KNOWS the strike zone. he's had to expand his zone considerably especially with 2 strikes, and while his walk rate is right in line with previous years he has not been as effective at the plate because the strike zone has become arbitrary. The treatment Chris Duncan has recieved is even more bizarre, although in his case he's had about the same number of strikes called balls and balls called strikes, so it is hard to get too excited. Albert has been flat-out robbed this season imho.

There was a BP article around the all-star break that confirms these things, btw, using questec data. I'm not just making anecdotal statements here.

Now, I don't know if Questec is the answer. There have been enough gameday bizarrities this year (and I know they are seperate systems, but gameday uses questec when it is available) that I'd be hesitant to consider the technology mature at this point. However, I think at the very least the umpires union needs to be broken and umpires who do poor jobs (Froemming, Hernandez, etc) should be removed from service; that will do more for the integrity of the game than using a potentially buggy computer-based system.

Posted by: SleepyCA at September 5, 2007 04:37 PM

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