LOL….I’m fine with, but not a massive fan of, the pitch clock (I think people will mostly not notice it ultimately), but this is absurd. We can‘t get umps to call a consistent trike zone without significant grading/reporting, but we’re just going to have “umps keep the game moving”? You’ll have some umps getting antsy at 8 seconds and some not paying attention until almost a minute has passed.
I heard an interesting bit on the Effectively Wild podcast earlier this week. It may have stemmed from a listener question, but someone at Fangraphs dug into data on check swing appeals and the results were pretty surprising. Of all the appeals this year on a play where you’d think there’s typically between a 40% and 60% likelihood that the hitter swung, you’d expect the range of umps granting the strike to be pretty similar. But no, that’s not what the numbers show. The most generous ump (they didn’t give names on the podcast, but the data is available somewhere) called the swing 44% of the time, which makes sense. The lowest? 5%. This is across each ump crew doing 125+ games by this point. The 5% is either not paying attention most of the time, or he’s just not going to give it unless it’s egregious. This is a good example of why we can’t “just let the umps regulate”. Either have a pitch clock or don’t, but don’t hand umps some arbitrary, undefined thing to make choices on.