E155 - Oliver Marmol Ejected by Cory Blaser After Nolan Arenado Strike, But May Have Beefed at Kulpa 

The TV K-zone needs to go away

​@@teebob21As someone who's lived (almost) my whole life with it on screen, I 100% agree.

Who doesn't love baseball?

Kulpa is one of the absolute worst. It was so great that we got rid of Joe West, who was so egotistical and full of himself. But it looks like Kulpa may be taking his place. MLB can’t do anything about it because they have no control over these umps.

@@bsdsooner that 88 outside from the previous day, he should wipe that smile off his face cause his ump buddy had to deal with a problem he started yesterday. And again, pitch close to zone, batter just stand and take it, like get the fking bat off your shoulders, you there to have a measuring contest or hit the ball.

The plate umpire will enjoy watching batters be emotionally compromised with absolutely no responsibility for causing it

so how do they adjust the high/low on the robot system? is there like a person who assigns it to every player?

I assume the machine looks at the player and adjusts the zone. Every batter has a unique strike zone. A pitch to a shorter batter that is a strike may be a ball to a taller player. Pitch call is based on where the ball crosses the plate, not where the catcher catches the ball. I umpire high school baseball and softball, plus adult baseball. Been doing it for 18 years.

End result was a good position and a good look and a good call.

yeah... thats exactly what she said in the video, he got it right, what do you want from the man, for him to immediately find a ball he thought was behind him and get in the way of the throw trying to position? Everything worked out, always has to be one guy who complains about nothing

@@tw1nn319 umpire haters gotta hate. They can’t control themselves.

Umpire haters are sitting on their couches eating potato chips and watching replays of marginal calls and cursing umpires. They are just a relection of the downward spiral of society today

@@danbev9313 now thats a good post. I have 5 18-U games today. I’m working my ass off and will be exhausted at the end of a 13 hour day. No couch and no chips.

you may see more players and managers being disciplined by the league office next year to crack down on arguing next season

It's a record. Umpires are getting soft.

@@joshfoulk6334 and it unfortunately be the players and coaches that will suffer at some point when the league office starts to tell them to knock it off

Cory Blaser is 41. Ron Kulpa is 54.

@@Subangelis Cool. Even more of a reason to get the challenge system

This...right here. All day and night long, MLB! Why do we need a buffer zone? That's just creating more chaos with balls and strikes. At some point in 3D space there's a defined strike zone unique for each batter. Either a part of the baseball makes contact with that 3D zone and is a strike or it does not and it's a ball. I understand you think you are trying to help The Game, MLB but, all you are doing is making the players, coaches and fans angry with the umpires on close pitches. This is so easy to fix but, MLB won't fix it because they think they are still retaining some element of the human factor. The tech works. Take off the training wheels and use the tech. Stop trying to straddle between the digital and analog worlds.

​@@1969EType we dont NEED a buffer zone. we don't even WANT a buffer zone. but there IS a buffer zone. the computer cant 100% call it a ball or a strike so it gives its best estimate and says its close. so no, the "tech" doesn't work as you say.

Umpires (as a group) have been getting better at calling the strike zone over the past two decades, but there are still limits to human vision. Those limits make it incredibly difficult to call the edges of the strike zone. There's a difference between calling a strike on a pitch just a millimeter off the plate and calling a strike on a pitch that's 6 inches off the plate. That's why there's the buffer zone - if you're going to grade umpires on their mistakes, a near miss is forgivable. Additionally, near misses with the pitch tracking technology may not actually be misses. The Statcast/Hawk-Eye tracking system, which gives us the data that umpires are graded on, has possible error rates up to an inch. So a near miss may be correctly called by the umpire even if the computer system says differently. The buffer zone acknowledges the difficulty of the task and the limits of the technology used to assess the task's performance.

The buffer zone is a limitation of the equipment. The system that provides the data on where the pitch crossed the front of the plate has a 1" margin of error. That means that the pitch could actually have crossed within 1" of where the equipment says it crossed. There is no equipment out there that has a zero margin of error in measuring anything. Some machines are calibrated to have much closer tolerances, but they work quite differently. The box on the screen does not use a margin of error, which is part of the problem. Sometimes post game processing of the data ends up moving the location slightly. That is what the margin of error is for. To say that we should have no margin of error is to say that we should expect more out of a machine than it is capable of producing.

The buffer zone exist because the manufacturer of the computer that MLB uses to grade its umpire is not confident in the computer's ability to call pitches within that area. Eventually the technology will be perfected where there won't need one. However, for as long as the limitations to the technology is exist, so will the margin of error.

what are you talking about