Yesterday’s Umpire Scorecard

As a warm-up before getting to the scorecard, let’s look at the 13 called strikes that missed the strike zone by at least 3.5 inches. Yes, there is one there by Erik Swanson.

The Scorecard shows the Mariners were ‘favoured’ by 0.89 runs. Obviously, the way things turned out, they benefitted more than that. The second and third worst impactful calls came at the top of the first. Both of the third strikes were called balls. The most impactful call was a strike on Springer that was well off the plate.

Now I don’t think that umpires try to favour any team. It doesn’t go that way. Calls are made too quickly for the umpire to think, ‘Hey, that pitch was clearly over the plate, but I want the other team to win, so I’m going to call it a ball’. It just doesn’t happen.

But it is irritating when a big miss messes up an inning (or, in yesterday’s case, two big misses). There is no way of knowing if the Jays would have won if the umpire had made the right call. Maybe Bassitt needed the anger to pitch the next four scoreless innings. Maybe the Jays batters were more ‘locked in’ because they fell behind early. Maybe the Mariners starter relaxed because of the early lead. But I wish the easy calls could be made.

Anyway, here it is:

I mentioned in yesterday's GameThread that the Jays traded Vinny Capra to the Pirates for catcher Tyler Heineman. Heineman was optioned to Buffalo, and Jordan Luplow was removed from the 40-man and assigned to the Bisons.

I catching depth is valued, I see.

Capra was #40 on our top 40 prospect list last year. This year he aged out.