I’m listening to the third game of the Angels/Red Sox series tonight on WEEI, and there is a lot of discussion about last night’s umpiring crew. Specifically, there’s a lot of talk about the two calls during Nick Green’s at bat in the ninth that some, including Angel’s manager Mike Scioscia, say gave the game to the Red Sox in their 9-8 victory.

If you haven’t seen the highlight clip, you can see it here.

“What was the count — 3 and 4, to Green?”, asked Scioscia in the post game news conference.

I wrote an article last season during the MLB Playoffs about poor officiating, and I thought and still do, that umpires should be fined for poor calls. And in a sense, they are. MLB uses a camera system called the Umpire Information System to monitor pitches and measure the officiating umpire’s efficiency in making strike and ball calls. It’s made by a company called QuesTec. Essentially, the best umpires get to call the higher paying playoff games, and the guys who suck do not. Fenway is one of the ballparks that uses the UIS.

What’s interesting is that MLB will not release the results of the UIS to the public. I suppose the reasoning is they don’t want their umpires heckled during a game about how they suck, thus distracting them from making the correct calls. So it’s impossible to find out if there is a statistical bias for calls made for the Red Sox in Fenway, or for any home team. But my guess would be that there is a slight bias for any home team in a decent sized market.

If you watch the highlight clip of Green’s at bat, he gets the check swing pass from the first base umpire, then the non-strike call from Rick Reed on the 3-2 ball. Did Green get a break? Ehhhhhhhh…

The pressure from the crowd for a win in dramatic fashion has to be tremendous, especially for a team that is in contention, but not locked into a Playoff berth like the Sox. So did Reed cave? Ehhhhhhhh…

The closer, Brian Fuentes said:

“You hear it from guys [players],” Fuentes said, according to the Orange County Register’s Bill Plunkett. “Especially here and some other places, they [umpires] get a little timid to make a call. You hear it time and time again. … It’s either human mistakes or they’re scared. Maybe it’s coincidence maybe it’s not. It’s something you have to live with, I guess.” - taken from Projo.com

There’s an excellent article on Sons of Sam Horn about the efficiency of the umpires in MLB that made me rethink the whole thing. On the whole, umpires have an insane accuracy record considering they make the calls unaided by the tracking systems we get when watching on TV. And I think if Rick Reed made the wrong call last night, it was not intentionally.  Human error is part of the game of baseball. No umpire is perfect, and mistakes will be made. Even though I want my guys to win legitimately, it’s part of the enjoyment of the game.

Angels’ outfielder Torii Hunter solidified my opinion with the following:

“What happened at the end of the game … we lost that game long ago. We made too many mistakes. We made some bad mistakes early on – mistakes that we hadn’t been making all season, man. We get here and we make mistakes that we haven’t been making all season. We get to New York and we make mistakes we haven’t been making.”

I admire Hunter’s blunt honesty: if you sucked at everything else, don’t blame losing the game on a questionable call.

That hasn’t stopped formal complaints from Mike Scioscia and the Angels organization. MLB is currently investigating the calls by Rick Reed in last night’s game.

And even as I listen to tonight’s game, home plate Umpire Jeff Kellogg has just called out Mike Lowell on a ball that the announcers say was 3 to 4 inches off the plate. Will Scioscia log a complaint about that call as well?

If none of this satisfies you, I found this website that charts the sabremetrics of the games in insane detail, and apparently, Rick Reed had a high bottom of the strike zone all night.

But what do you think, is there a home team bias from umpires in the MLB? And is Boston more guilty than other cities?