Home-plate umpire Pat Hoberg was perfect in Game 2 on Saturday night, calling 129 pitches and calling them all correctly, according to a tweet from Umpire Scorecards.
Poor Hoberg. It was his first time behind home plate in a World Series game. Good luck trying to improve in his second.
If you’ve watched enough baseball in 2022, you know how rare it is for any umpire to be as good as Hoberg was on Saturday. It’s as rare as a pitcher throwing a complete game in the playoffs. It’s as rare as John Smoltz saying something insightful.
It doesn’t happen, and it isn’t likely to change.
MLB changed the rules for 2023, instituting a pitch clock, banning the shift, enlarging the bases, all designed to increase offense and interest. But it didn’t do — yet — the one thing that might accomplish those goals — stop making hitters guess how far the outside corner extends. Automate the strike zone.
There’s plenty of reasons why offense was down in 2022, from countless relievers throwing 100 mph (95 is the new 90), to defenders playing in areas that were thought to be safe for hits, to too many strikeouts to too much launch angle to not enough small ball.
Some, or all of that, might be true in varying degrees. But I can’t imagine it’s easy to hit when the strike zone is a moving target. We tell the youngest of ball players to swing at strikes, but we don’t tell them what that is varies at the whim of the umpire.
How many times has an umpire been described as a low-ball umpire or as someone who calls the high strike? Why should strikes be different for different umpires?
Or how many times has a strike not been called because the pitcher missed his target and the catcher had to reach across the plate to catch it? And it’s explained that the pitch wasn’t a strike because of how the catcher caught it? Why is that? It’s the catcher’s glove that moved, not the strike zone.
For years the myth was that umps might miss an occasional call, but that’s because they were only human, they didn’t miss many and they were better than any other sport’s officials. Then instant replay was adopted and we learned the occasional missed call was common.
“Looks like he’s out,” said announcer Jim Palmer in 1985, watching a replay of Jorge Orta’s infield hit in Game 6 of the World Series, and there’s a pretty good reason for it. Because Orta was out by a full step. Fifteen seconds later, after watching two more replays, Al Michaels concurs. “I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.”
The entire clip, from Orta topping his ground ball, to Palmer and Michaels determining the correct call, takes little more than a minute. It took MLB a little longer to rectify the kind of injustice which might have cost the Cardinals a World Series. It took 23 more years for MLB to institute a replay system when the technology existed at that precise moment in 1985 to call Orta out. Progress sometimes is as slow as a Molina rounding the bases.
None of this is to vilify Don Denkinger, the umpire who made the wrong call. It all happened so fast isn’t just said at crime scenes, and it did for Denkinger. But it could have been any umpire.
The greater culprit is MLB, which watched the outcome of its championship settled by an arbiter’s error, had the means to prevent it from happening again and took more than two decades to act. And then it was only after the uproar in response to Armando Galarraga’s imperfect perfect game that MLB updated its replay system.
Which brings us back to today. Baseball is experimenting with alternatives to the home-plate umpire, from robot umpires to reviewing bad calls to any number of ways. Let’s stipulate that there are ground rules to be agreed on.
But the technology exists for tennis’ U.S. Open to eliminate linesmen and lineswomen because it’s easier for a machine to digest all the info in a split second than the human eye. We can be pretty sure technology wouldn’t have consumed all the info on Joe Mauer’s 2009 ALDS fly ball — it ticked off Melky Cabrera’s glove, landed fair and bounced into the stands — and call it foul. Phil Cuzzi did that.
It’s way past time for MLB to look at technology as a benefit. Just because football uses Stone Age equipment to measure first downs doesn’t mean MLB has to be Neanderthals. Most of us don’t complain when our E-Zpass gets us through a toll booth without having to stop for a toll collector. Eliminating the strike that’s actually four inches outside will be just as great a benefit for baseball.
Commissioner Rob Manfred, in an interview this summer with ESPN’s Jeff Passan, said MLB is moving to an automated strike zone or robot umpires by 2024. Good for Manfred, who absorbs plenty of criticism, much of it deserved. On nights Pat Hoberg isn’t calling balls and strikes, 2024 can’t get here soon enough.
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