Arizona Diamondbacks blown calls of the week, June 7-13

Summary

• 47 bad calls in total, averaging 7.8 per game.
• As last week, all but one game was at home this time. The road game was evenly split at 5-5. The home split went against the D-backs at 16-21, but as we’ll see, all of that margin - and then some! - was the result of one particularly skewed umpire.
• The totals for the year
  Overall: 215-244 (46.8% favor the D-backs)
  Home: 134-133 (50.2%)
  Road: 102-137 (42.7%)
• The home split is basically as even as it could be to this point, after a total of 267 calls tracked by the automated process. Though the gap narrowed slightly this week, there remains a statistically-significant skew of the road calls agains the Diamondbacks.
• Best-called game: June 8, 15-3 vs SDP (Tim Timmons). The umpiring this week was a little more questionable, averaging almost eight calls per game, but Timmons called a steady zone, with only five flagged decisions. Not that it mattered too much, shall we say!
• Worst-called game: June 13, 7-6 @ DET (Jerry Layne). This was a close fought contest. It could have gone to Tripp Gibson on Saturday, who did have both the highest percentage of blown calls, and the worst call of the week. It could have been Dan Iassogna, for remarkable bias, above and beyond the normal call. But we go with Layne yesterday, for a strike-zone which appears to have been roughly the dimensions of a discarded postage-stamp.

• Worst confirmed call

The individual games

June 7, 7-4 vs SDP (Clint Fagan)

• 8 bad calls (2.20% of pitches)
• 6 help, 2 hurt
• 2 outrageously bad calls
• Bad call score: 620
• Worst call

June 8, 15-3 vs SDP (Tim Timmons)

• 5 bad calls (1.68% of pitches)
• 3 help, 2 hurt
• 1 outrageously bad call
• Bad call score: 396
• Worst call

June 9, 6-8 vs MIL (Nic Lentz)

• 7 bad calls (2.19% of pitches)
• 3 help, 4 hurt
• 3 outrageously bad calls
• Bad call score: 614
• Worst call

What’s interesting is that the above followed on the heels of another 2% call, earlier in the same at-bat - which went the other direction, favoring the Brewers, when strike one was called on Blanco, when the pitch should have been ball two. The above may have been the very definition of a make-up call in action.

June 10, 3-2 vs MIL (Tripp Gibson)

• 8 bad calls (3.39% of pitches)
• 4 help, 4 hurt
• 2 outrageously bad calls
• Bad call score: 696
• Worst call

June 11, 11-1 vs. MIL (Dan Iassogna)

• 9 bad calls (2.75% of pitches)
• 0 help, 9 hurt
• 3 outrageously bad calls
• Bad call score: 750
• Worst call

What’s remarkable here is that every single one of the nine blown calls favored the Brewers. The odds of such a one-sided arrangement happening by chance, in either direction? About 0.4% - basically, imagine flipping a coin nine times in a row, and it coming up the same way every time. If his bias had decided the painfully close game this was through the seventh inning stretch, I’d have been miffed. Fortunately, it didn’t.

June 13, 7-6 @ DET (Jerry Layne)

• 10 bad calls (3.04% of pitches)
• 5 help, 5 hurt
• 4 outrageously bad calls
• Bad call score: 858
• Worst call