Umpire experience
Yesterday, while having a conversation with my brother Erik on the rumored effects of QuesTec, he brought up an interesting point. Are the umpires who’ve been in the league for a long time resisting changing their strike zones to comply with the QuesTec standard?
I took the umpires for which I had MLB experience data, and compared their percentage of balls called to the overall average for all umpires.
I’m kind of surprised that you can actually see a spread of strike zone variance as umpires increase in experience. That’s what I’m trying to illustrate with the red wedge in the next image.
It’s also worth noting that the mass hire of umpires after the failed resignation tactic in 1999 is grouped fairly closely to the league average, while umpires hired well before then are more widespread. The vertical red line in the second graph indicates about when the resignation took place and new umpires were hired.
Also, it may start sounding like a broken record, but what the heck is going on with Doug Eddings? He’s been in his own zip code on nearly every graph I turn out.