Umpire Stats

Also was alerted to this interesting analysis of umpires based on data from BP. This analysis is just for 2006.

In and of itself this doesn't tell us much since you would expect there to be some spread here due to randomness. Nor is it surprising that, for example, some of the same umpires show up in high SO/9 quadrant as well as the high percentage of called strikes quadrant since they are clearly related. It would be interesting to see whether there is any trend that holds over from year to year (for example for Randy Marsh who has a very low % of called balls and a high % of called strikes) and then to quantify the effect if any. The author notes that he is looking into this so stay tuned.

And while the two measures that are shown are clearly related it could be that some umps are more hesitant to ring batters up or make a ball four call and so that could explain why an umpire appears to be a "hitter's ump" in one graph and a "pitcher's ump" in another (again Randy Marsh is an example). Interesting stuff.