Arizona Diamondbacks Blown Calls of the Week: August 30-September 4

Posting this a day earlier than usual, for scheduling reasons. But before we get to the strike-zone, let’s mention the week’s big umpiring topic, the blown video review call in the Cardinals-Giants series. Beyond the Box Score has a nice evisceration of the parties responsible, but basically review crew ignorance of AT&T Park ground rules resulted in them getting an obvious home-run call wrong, reversing the original, correct on-field decision. It was so woefully bad that MLB issued a press release, accepting the mistake and ending with the wonderfully understated sentence, “MLB regrets the error.” No shit.

Summary

• 55 bad calls in total, an average of 9.2 per game. That’s an ugly figure, though at least the numbers were consistent, with all four games from Thursday through Sunday having exactly ten blown calls.
• In contrast to last week, when virtually everything went against us, five of the six games skewed towards the Diamondbacks. That included both home games, where the tally was 11-6. The road games were a little closer to even, but even there, the tally was 21-17 in favor of us.
• The totals for the year
  Overall: 499-555 (47.3% favor the D-backs)
  Home: 252-263 (48.9%)
  Road: 247-292 (45.8%)
• Best-called game: Aug 30, 6-4 vs. LAD (Doug Eddings). Though with seven blown calls, this was more like the “least worst-called game” than anything particularly worthy of praise.
• Worst-called game: Sep 3, 5-1 @ COL (Scott Barry). With four games tied on 10 blown calls, and no obvious consensus across percentage of bad calls or bad call score, I ended up going to the Fangraphs chart and eyeballing the strike zones. There, it came down to a battle between Barry and Brian O'Nora (Sep 1), but Barry’s was just slightly more inconsistent.

• Worst confirmed call. Looking at the overall chart of the game, it looks like there was a worse call than the black dot largely eclipsed by a red one at about 9 o’clock on the strike zone (remember, Fangraphs and @DiamondbacksUmp are mirrored). The pitch just below and to the right on the chart was also tagged by @DiamondbacksUmp, but because of the shape of the zone, was seen as having an 8% call agreement. So we go with this one instead.

The individual games

Aug 30, 6-4 vs. LAD (Doug Eddings)

• 7 bad calls (2.49% of pitches)
• 4 help, 3 hurt
• 0 outrageously bad calls
• Bad call score: 584
• Worst call

Aug 31, 8-1 vs. LAD (Jeff Nelson)

• 10 bad calls (3.51% of pitches)
• 7 help, 3 hurt
• 3 outrageously bad calls
• Bad call score: 838
• Worst call

Sep 1, 9-5 @ COL (Brian O'Nora)

• 10 bad calls (3.03% of pitches)
• 6 help, 4 hurt
• 2 outrageously bad calls
• Bad call score: 866
• Worst call

Sep 2, 6-2 @ COL (Paul Emmel)

• 10 bad calls (2.99% of pitches)
• 7 help, 3 hurt
• 2 outrageously bad calls
• Bad call score: 900
• Worst call

Sep 3, 5-1 @ COL (Scott Barry)

• 10 bad calls (3.48% of pitches)
• 3 help, 7 hurt
• 3 outrageously bad calls
• Bad call score: 850
• Worst call

Sep 4, 13-0 @ LAD (Alfonso Marquez)

• 8 bad calls (2.71% of pitches)
• 5 help, 3 hurt
• 2 outrageously bad calls
• Bad call score: 662
• Worst call