Baseball umpires aren't as bad as you think this season

Despite what you may have heard — or think you've seen with your own two eyes — Major League Baseball's umpires are actually doing pretty well this season, at least when it comes to calling balls and strikes.

By the numbers: League-wide, baseball umps have a nearly 94% accuracy rating so far in 2024, per unofficial metric-keeper UmpScorecards.

• That's down a bit from 2023 but up from a relatively miserable 90% or so in 2015.

How it works: UmpScorecards' accuracy stat tracks the percentage "of called pitches called correctly by the umpire."

• See more about their methodology here.

Yes, but: There's no shortage of evidence that umps are struggling lately. So what's really happening?

• It's never been easier for egregiously bad calls to go viral on social media, where they're the bread and butter of hugely popular channels like Jomboy Media.
• The accuracy stat also treats every pitch as equal. If an ump makes a bad call at a critical moment in a game, that's obviously going to create more fan outcry.
• Plus, with around 150 called pitches in a typical game, a handful of bad calls can make the difference between a relatively high accuracy rating and the bottom of the barrel.

There's also a decent gap between the best- and worst-performing umpires so far this year.

• The top ump, Derek Thomas, has a 96.1% accuracy rating across six games and 1,027 called pitches.
• His lowest-ranked counterpart, John Bacon, is at 90% — but has only overseen a single game, in which he called 201 pitches.

What of umpire Angel Hernandez, the source of many a baseball fan's ire this year?

• He's at 93.3% across six games and 1,099 called pitches— middling, but better than you might expect.

Caveat: Calling balls and strikes is only part of an ump's job. There's plenty of other stuff they can mess up too.

The bottom line: The robo-umps are maybe coming one day, anyway.