Umpires Show Bias for Stars and Strikes - Scientific American

Did we really need a scientific study to "prove" something that has been handed down for generations and is as embedded in baseball lore as almost anything can be? You can go to any umpires clinic on just about any level and hear this approach espoused.

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/quotes/quohorn.shtml

"Son (to a rookie pitcher), when you pitch a strike, Mr. (Rogers) Hornsby will let you know it." - Umpire Bill Klem

I've heard the same quote attributed to a different generation of umpires about Ted WIlliams.

http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/35baa190

Ted Williams

This article was written by Bill Nowlin.

Great hitters get the benefit of the doubt, as do great pitchers. - The star effect.
"Call strikes, you'll get home faster" - advice given to EVERY umpire on EVERY level.

 

from Scientific American:
Umpires Show Bias for Stars and Strikes - Scientific American:

Now research reveals that even top-notch umps are subject to decision-making bias, often in a game’s most important moments. That’s according to a study to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Management Science. [Jerry W. Kim and Brayden G. King,Seeing Stars: Matthew Effects and Status Bias in Major League Baseball Umpiring]

A team of Northwestern and Columbia university researchers analyzed more than 700,000 pitches thrown during the 2008 and 2009 seasons. They found that umpires called about 14 percent of nonswinging pitches wrong. And umps were least accurate when the game was on the line in the ninth inning and when calling a strike would end an at-bat. They also tended to favor All-Star pitchers, especially those with a reputation for good control.

Of course, there’s no way to know how challenging a handful of the hundreds of pitches thrown in any given game would affect the outcome. And you might create a different umpire bias—against managers who demand too many replays.

—Larry Greenemeier

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Business School Research Archive:

SEEING STARS: MATTHEW EFFECTS AND STATUS BIAS IN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL UMPIRING

JERRY KIM

Publication type: Forthcoming article

Research Archive Topic: Leadership, Organizations

Abstract

This paper tests the assumption that evaluators are biased to positively evaluate high-status individuals, irrespective of quality. Using unique data from Major League Baseball umpires? evaluation of pitch quality, which allow us to observe the difference in a pitch?s objective quality and in its perceived quality as judged by the umpire, we show that umpires are more likely to overrecognize quality by expanding the strike zone, and less likely to underrecognize quality by missing pitches in the strike zone for high-status pitchers. Ambiguity and the pitcher?s reputation as a ?control pitcher? moderate the effect of status on umpire judgment. Furthermore, we show that umpire errors resulting from status bias lead to actual performance differences for the pitcher and team.
View Ideas at Work: Feature

Citation

Kim, Jerry. "Seeing Stars: Matthew Effects and Status Bias in Major League Baseball Umpiring." Management Science (forthcoming).

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