Are Baseball Umpires Racist?

I suppose we should have seen this one coming a mile away after the NBA officials racism study, by the same authors, I believe. Here goes. I have the entire study, but I'm going to wait until after I relax a little before going over it in depth.

What I read on the first run through indicated that Questec had an effect on reducing the number of "bad" or "biased" calls. That's kind of a "No, duh" conclusion. Questec was intended to get umpires, who years ago had strike zone's as unique as their personalities, back to the rule-book definition. So it's not unusual to report that the device is doing what it was supposed to do.

Secondly, they report that higher attendance tends to reduce errors. Well, who'd have thought that? You mean during a big game, your adrenaline wouldn't pump, your focus wouldn't increase versus a poorly attended game? I would not have guessed that researchers. I guess that's why you fellas get the big bucks. Excellent Stuff.

Third, from the Time article:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1652338,00.html

Hamermesh, who has studied discrimination at all levels, says that bias is instilled in infancy — much like enduring personality traits such as shyness or high self-esteem — as an essential part of human behavior. "We all have these subconscious preferences for our own group," he says.

Does this remind you of the phrase "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Selection Bias on Line Three.
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http://www.fannation.com/blogs/post/51336

Are Baseball Umpires Racist?
1 day ago :: 1344 Views
Time magazine is reporting that, "According to a new
study led by Daniel Hamermesh, a professor of
economics at the University of Texas at Austin, Major
League Baseball umpires tend to call more strikes when
the pitcher is of their same race. When they're not,
umps call more balls. It doesn't happen all the time -
in about 1% of pitches thrown - but that's still one
pitch per game, and it could be the one that makes the
difference."

The magazine goes on to say that Hamermesh reached
this conclusion after he and his team of researchers
"analyzed the calls on 2.1 million pitches thrown in
the Major League between the 2004 and 2006 seasons."

What's your initial reaction to the report?
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One call per game? And that shows bias? The only way
they could be less "Biased" is if they were perfect.
So does this show anything other than they are
somewhere between human and total F-ups, but closer to
perfect than anything. What am I missing here?

And even Questec has a margin of error on what it
considers a "bad" call and a "right" call, because by
definition the calls have some bit of subjectivity
involved.

I umpire games and I've played before with umpires I
thought were biased against me (because I'm short) and
you'd have to mess up 1 call per at bat to take the
bat out of a teams hands, that would be a ratio of
around one bad call per 6-7 pitches on average.
Otherwise, even if you were trying to hose a team, the
batter still has the bat in his hand and can
reasonably insure that the ball doesn't even get back
to the home plate umpire. No calls in that situation.

I'd have to see more than this or more than 1% before
I'm convinced
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1% of 75 calls is actually less than 1 call per game. Seems like we're really splitting hairs here and imaging a Bogey-man in that one call. The only way you can do better than one call in error per game, it seems to me, is to call a perfect game. Laudable goal. But a goal nonetheless.

When I umpire, my goal is to have only one ball/strike call per game per team that I would like to have back. That I think I missed for reasons that never have to do with race. Catcher moves and blocks your sight, pitch fools you (it happens), check swings, etc.

SI did a story where one of it's reporters umpired MLB pre-season games, he reported Questec showed a 5% error rate among umpires vs. the computers subjective opinion. Seems high but I suppose it's possible.

Zambrano got the benefit of two ?? calls vs. Pujols last night. Either the ump was clearly off-center with his positioning, or he was delivering a message to Pujols re: complaining about calls.

Sometimes academic studies don't include a good grasp of what happens "down in the trenches".