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Posted

Torey Lovullo just got his money’s worth after being tossed by Laz Diaz. don’t see guys get that animated as often as you used to, but Laz has a way of bringing it out of people.

Posted

this home played umpire in Atlanta is having a tough night early on, I’ll be interested to see what his report card ends up looking like.

Posted

this guy is fucking awful. wow. he’ll make a called strike on a ball out of the zone, then call a ball on the exact same pitch except that this one is 100% in the zone. this guy sucks.

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

home plate umpire in cincy has been an absolute joke, and i’ve only been watching for 1.5 innings. just terrible. announcers just mentioned that both dugouts have been livid, and claimed it’s, “just been a ‘shake your head’ type of day”.

Posted

annnnd oli mármol has been tossed. and of course, the fat, red faced, hypersensitive umpire is about 10 levels of anger above where mármol is at. fucking confrontational, “wish-somebody-would” ass umpires man. 

Posted

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6328105/2025/05/01/mlb-umpire-strike-zone-buffer-zone-change/

Quote

In the winter, Major League Baseball negotiated a seemingly simple change in how home-plate umpires are graded and evaluated. But now, a month into the season, its impact on balls and strikes has players asking questions about what they believe is a tightened strike zone — and searching for ways to adjust to a new wrinkle they say caught them by surprise.

That change, which was part of a new labor agreement with the Major League Umpires Association, significantly decreased the margin of error for umpires in their evaluations — and has resulted in fewer called strikes off the edges of the plate through the same point as last season.

“Everybody’s zone has shrunk,” Angels catcher Travis d’Arnaud told The Athletic. “Every (umpire) across the league.”

The actual number of pitches affected is relatively small. But the reaction — from pitchers, catchers, pitching coaches and analytics-driven front offices — has been anything but. They say the shift in how balls and strikes are now called is already having an impact on game-planning, pitch sequencing, pitch framing techniques, evaluation models and even roster construction.

For the past two decades, umpires were working with a “buffer zone” that gave them 2 inches of leeway — on all sides of the plate, just off the strike zone — when they were graded on how accurately they called balls and strikes.

Now, however, that buffer zone has shrunk, from 2 inches on all sides to just three-quarters of an inch on all sides, inside and outside the strike zone (1.5 inches total), according to league sources briefed on the change but not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. An MLB official confirmed that the buffer zone had decreased in size.

 

TLDR: MLB changed the way that umpires are graded over the offseason by shrinking the "buffer zone" from 2 inches to 3/4 inch which has effectively squeezed the strike zone.

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