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Phillies/Reds Umpire Missed Nearly Two Dozen Calls on Sunday
Published:
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:
Umpire Sean Barber missed 21 calls today for a correct percentage of 87.9%.
He started his day by blowing a strikeout to Nick Castellanos and then ejecting him.
He finished it by gifting the Reds a ball in the 8th to extend the inning. Reds went on to score 3 and win by 3. pic.twitter.com/JyC7hIEDlm
— Umpire Auditor (@UmpireAuditor) August 16, 2021
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.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com