If you watched Sunday’s game you knew this already, but umpire Sean Barber stunk up the joint.

To further confirm that, Umpire Auditor gave the Phillies/Reds game the special video treatment:

Right, so it was 4-3 Reds at that point. An RBI single from Tucker Barnhart made it 5-3, Hector Neris came in, gave up a two-run homer to Tyler Stephenson, and that was all she wrote.

Bob says that 87.9 percent is “really bad” and notes that the MLB average entering Sunday was 94%. That’s according to another site called “Umpire Scorecards.

The data from the above tweet is mined from MLB’s pitch-tracking data, and Umpire Auditor explains their process this way:


“Each individual pitch returns more than 30 attributes, including the top and bottom of the strike zone, X coordinate location, Y coordinate location, and the call made by the umpire. For every pitch, Umpire Auditor calculates whether the umpire made the right call.”

Human beings get things wrong, but not all errors are the same, and on Sunday a couple of big ones changed the course of the game. Might be time to roll the robots out there.