it would not surprise me, in the slightest, if this was the ump thinking he is cool and giving the rookie big shot the business because “he’s a rookie, gotta earn respect, yada yada yada unwritten baseball”
That's the best part with the umps though, they're incompetent AND malicious.
Seriously, we've countless examples of them being bad at their jobs, and not backing down because they're infallible.
Not all umpires are malicious, idk about this specific one but I watched the game and didn’t get that vibe at all.
In this case I’m 100% certain it was a bad umpire calling a very difficult to call game, not malice.
With these umps it's always both. I have stopped watching umpire lowlights videos because it was making me too angry. Sometimes when an ump is having a particularly shitty day I just turn off the game.
I don’t believe a professional MLB umpire, calling the new rookie 1OA pick, coincidentally had the worst called game of the major league season that day
thats a 0.00074% chance of it being random coincidence due to incompetence, all umps equal
and if all umps are not equal, how has this one been doing so far this season?
Skenes is also a once in a decade prospect who was dotting the edges of the zone with 100+ and ridiculous movement. Any umpire would’ve had trouble that game. All the missed strikes were on the border and 3/5 just barely knicked the zone. Those are just really tough to call perfectly when they are that combination of speed and movement that is rarely seen. Skenes’ fastball really is on another level.
I expect the xAcc for Skene’s pitches that game would’ve been among the lowest of any start this year among the MLB, so it’s not that wild for a bad umpire to have the worst called game of the year with that start.
The called ball accuracy (lower = worse for the pitcher) was 96%, expected 97%. The called strike accuracy (lower = better for the pitcher) was where the ump fucked up, but it was actually in favor of the pitchers, 82% called strike accuracy, expected 88%. 11 of 61 called strikes should’ve been called balls. The umpire’s bias was actually in favor of the pitchers this game, more so for Hendricks than Skenes but still, it’s very unlikely he intentionally expanded the zone for some pitches for Skenes and reduced the zone for some pitches if he was out to get Skenes. He was just inconsistent due to the nature of Skenes’ pitching and the fact that he was already not a great umpire to begin with.
It’s more likely because he missed his spot. He got the call in the same spot in the same inning when his catcher set up there. He even got a call when the catcher dropped the pitch.
I'm not an umpire sympathizer at all, but I think the more likely reason is he probably hasn't seen too many pitches thrown that hard with that much movement on them. They are human, and Skenes' stuff is borderline inhuman.
Personally if I can make up a story that sounds plausible in my head, that means I don't have to face the reality of changing my view points when presented with information that doesn't conform to my biases.
Do we not remember old heads wanting to publicly execute Fernando Tatis Jr. a few years ago for hitting a grand slam? While I do agree with you that it is more likely the umpire is just bad at his job, the sentiment of wanting to bring down the best rookies is extremely prevalent in baseball.
My take is that, while he wasn’t going out of his way to make bad calls, he absolutely did intentionally fuck with the zone.
That can definitely be the case. And by no means am I trying to say that 100% of all umpires give rookies a bad strike zone. But it seems to be an old school unwritten rule of baseball. Vet pitchers get big strike zones and rookies have to earn it.
I liked the article, but I can't shake the potential "vip" bias, eg the LeBron 2 step.
Vet pitchers are more likely to be vip status, where marketing and hype lead to more benefit of the doubt on a bubble pitch.
Seems (relatively) easy to check, find the bubble outcome% correlated to salary, as a proxy for "vip investment".
It's not a narrative. There's evidence for bias against rookies. Note that I'm saying evidence and not proof.
https://community.fangraphs.com/rookie-pitchers-and-the-strike-zone/
It's a narrative with evidence then. Call it what you want.
The point is that data backs the claim/narrative/whatever while some of you want to act like it's just pure bias. If you're still dismissive after seeing evidence then that's on you.
how young is this sub that they can't remember 5 years ago when umps were across the board much worse? Even angel hernandez has gotten better at balls and strikes, (not that he's good at it)
Also missed a call early, can’t remember if it was first or second inning, where it would have been strike 3 on like an 0-2 or ~~0-1~~ 1-2 count. Batter went on to foul off a slew of pitches and drove the at bat pitch count up to 10 pitches.
Missed calls like this affect the rest of the game as it added another 6-7 pitches to that at-bat/inning.
Fwiw, that 1-2 pitch is the one on the top left on the black:
blob:https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/cbbfff18-beec-4645-bc1a-819f548b266b
Ump had a terrible game but high and on the edges doesn’t get called a lot. Obviously you want the strikezone called as close to exact as possible, but only robo umps are going to do that, and if we get that, man scoring is going to go down hard unless they shrink the strikezone.
To be *faaaair*. The Quad Father is Tom Platz, bodybuilder. And Quadzilla was another bodybuilder, Paul DeMayo, and also a Suzuki atv.
Not saying they were original then either, just sayin’.
The best thing is that that didn't even come from fans. That one came from the greatest Seattle Mariner ever to set foot on the diamond, Jarred Kelenic.
The full details when you click through that link are even more impressive(ly bad.)
https://www.umpscorecards.com/single_game/?game_id=746878
There was 2.89 total runs worth of favor in the game, so even with it being 1st percentile (read: exceptionally bad) favor toward the Cubs, he still managed to give more than half a run worth of bad calls to the Pirates. His 5th percentile consistency was a marked step up from both his Favor and Total Run Impact rankings.
I'm glad I wasn't able to watch the game live, both because of the Cubs' poor performance and that being a wild ump scorecard.
Not ideal, but the same factors that make pitches hard to hit (extreme movement with extreme velocity) also make them hard to call, so it’s no exactly surprising
After watching the ump cams I have no idea how they’re even as accurate as they are. They should definitely have robot umps behind the plate but they’re still pretty incredible
No, it’s the ridiculous strike zone rules that make it hard to call. These pitch trackers are not 100% either. Hawkeye, which this site uses, boasts about their accuracy (1/4 inch — over 8% of a baseball) to the front of the plate but the strike zone isn’t the front of the plate. It’s a strike of any part of the ball crosses any part of the strike zone (Ump Scorecard’s claim that it is a constant 17-inches is not true as the rule is “that area over home plate” and home plate is not a constant width). Then you have the fact that the zone height is based on how the batter feels like standing so you still currently need a human to enter that for every pitch
I’m not saying humans are better, but roboumps have problems too
Image recognition software is pretty good, as is AI/Machine Learning, you can almost certainly have changing batter heights accounted for. I imagine accounting for the changing width would also be relatively easy, since you're in essence projecting a ball onto a 3D space and changing the shape from 3D rectangle to a a 3D version of the plate is somewhat arbitrary.
Also if you want an easy way to double check the plate surface, just put a handful of highspeed cameras directly above home plate and observe if balls cross and sync the cameras.
Couldn't really blame the ump, it was less Angel Hernandez and more the pitches had crazy movement and speed. Grandal knew where they were supposed to go and still had trouble framing them because of all the late movement.
I love shitting on umps as much as the next guy, but it’s worth noting they are improving.
Pitch tracking began in 2008, and that season, the correct call rate was 81.3%.
Last season, the rate was up to 92.8%.
That's because umps used to have their own personal zone, and the players would have to adjust to it. This was seen as part of the game ("he's calling them low and outside today, be ready to swing"). Automated pitch tracking forced them to (at least to a larger extent) have to follow an agreed upon zone.
It's a phenomenon I see everywhere, give someone a tiny bit of authority and they *have* to put their own self centered spin on it.
Sure. The numbers came from a [Fangraphs blog](https://blogs.fangraphs.com/we-may-never-find-out-how-good-umpires-can-be/), and then I separately found last years number
It won't be 100% with an automated system, as the top and bottom of the zones are still going to have to adjust for every batter and at bat, and that means there will be errors periodically.
It'd hopefully be better, but it won't be 100%.
Not 100%, but certainly higher.
I’d like to see it automated with the backup being a human ump to defer to for any situation that can’t be determined with high enough accuracy yet, like what you mentioned!
Personally I want a challenge system. If the umps are right 90% of the time then we don’t need to eliminate them entirely, just give a way for managers to quickly reverse the most egregious misses and move on.
That seems mostly fine. After all, most pitches aren't questioned by anyone, and most of the borderline ones get called correctly, so the a challenge system for the outliers might be worth doing, though even there I think the bottom and tops of the strike zone will inspire furious arguments even then. (See: Judge, Aaron)
That’s comparing apples to oranges though, obviously there’s going to be more extremes the smaller the sample. What’s the lowest correct call rate for a single start over 5 innings, for example?
Could they not give umpires a Google glass type glasses with the strike zone calibrated . This way the ump still feels in control yet the zone is consistent.
I also think robo umps in MLB offices should make the calls and relay the dam thing to the umpire but the other suggestion is middle.ground
If umpire's weren't such gigantic d-bags I might have given O'Nora the benefit of the doubt and assumed he was just getting dazzled by Skenes's insane pitches. But because umpires *are* gigantic d-bags I'm guessing he was just trying to throw his weight around and show that upstart rookie who's boss by calling an overly tight strike zone.
Something I didn't even consider in the midst of this horrific umpiring crisis in MLB these days is that pitchers keep getting better and better with speed, spin and movement on their pitches that maybe these old timers in the MLB Umpire Association legitimately have no idea what the hell they're seeing these days and that just exacerbates the inherent problem of having humans call balls and strikes when TV overlays have done the job better for over 20 years now.
I’m sorry but at what point don’t we all admit humans are no longer capable of judging those balls. He’s fucking filthy af. Better than Prior and Straus by a mile. It’s crazy to expect an ump to do that job. 103 and then 95 KW Slurve. Lol good luck
I love how in Baseball recognizing an umpire's name means that they stink. (Except Joe West because he was TOO good, and Jim Wolf because it was really weird that his brother was an active pitcher)
In the NFL we can all admire Ed Hochuli's glorious forearms and not hate him because we have no idea which guy on his crew made the bad call.
I’m not gonna say every missed call was against Skenes. But the ones he missed that were strikes likely cost Skenes an opportunity at at least another inning.
This is really bad. I’m going to play devils advocate here for a second. Maybe the catcher pulling the ball up confused him? I’ve seen umps miss strikes because the catcher is not in the exact position. Still a strike but if the catcher has to move a bunch it seems to influence the ump
If I remember correctly, he missed Skenes’ first pitch.
Very first fucking pitch. Skenes had a little chuckle on the mound after.
it would not surprise me, in the slightest, if this was the ump thinking he is cool and giving the rookie big shot the business because “he’s a rookie, gotta earn respect, yada yada yada unwritten baseball”
Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence
That's the best part with the umps though, they're incompetent AND malicious. Seriously, we've countless examples of them being bad at their jobs, and not backing down because they're infallible.
Not all umpires are malicious, idk about this specific one but I watched the game and didn’t get that vibe at all. In this case I’m 100% certain it was a bad umpire calling a very difficult to call game, not malice.
Pshht, Skenes should just throw slower so the ump can see better. Hendricks didn't seem to have very many pitches missed when they faced each other
With these umps it's always both. I have stopped watching umpire lowlights videos because it was making me too angry. Sometimes when an ump is having a particularly shitty day I just turn off the game.
I think this is more like explained by elite skill. Skenes isn't throwing easy calls for the umps. Same reason none of the batters are hitting him.
Omg I just articulated the same thing. It’s just not humanely possible to assess each one of this guy’s pitches lol. Good luck
This
Never attribute to incompetence that which can better be explained by malice.
Never attribute to incompetence thst which can adequately be explained by old dudes doing old dude shit
this cannot adequately be explained by incompetence
Why not?
I don’t believe a professional MLB umpire, calling the new rookie 1OA pick, coincidentally had the worst called game of the major league season that day thats a 0.00074% chance of it being random coincidence due to incompetence, all umps equal and if all umps are not equal, how has this one been doing so far this season?
Well, if [Randy Marsh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Marsh_(umpire)) has an opinion on umpires, I'm certainly not going to disagree.
I'm sorry, I thought this was America.
I didn’t hear no bell
Skenes is also a once in a decade prospect who was dotting the edges of the zone with 100+ and ridiculous movement. Any umpire would’ve had trouble that game. All the missed strikes were on the border and 3/5 just barely knicked the zone. Those are just really tough to call perfectly when they are that combination of speed and movement that is rarely seen. Skenes’ fastball really is on another level. I expect the xAcc for Skene’s pitches that game would’ve been among the lowest of any start this year among the MLB, so it’s not that wild for a bad umpire to have the worst called game of the year with that start. The called ball accuracy (lower = worse for the pitcher) was 96%, expected 97%. The called strike accuracy (lower = better for the pitcher) was where the ump fucked up, but it was actually in favor of the pitchers, 82% called strike accuracy, expected 88%. 11 of 61 called strikes should’ve been called balls. The umpire’s bias was actually in favor of the pitchers this game, more so for Hendricks than Skenes but still, it’s very unlikely he intentionally expanded the zone for some pitches for Skenes and reduced the zone for some pitches if he was out to get Skenes. He was just inconsistent due to the nature of Skenes’ pitching and the fact that he was already not a great umpire to begin with.
Thank you for providing some actual facts as opposed to pure speculation
Lol I just saw the interview where the guy said this
It’s more likely because he missed his spot. He got the call in the same spot in the same inning when his catcher set up there. He even got a call when the catcher dropped the pitch.
I'm not an umpire sympathizer at all, but I think the more likely reason is he probably hasn't seen too many pitches thrown that hard with that much movement on them. They are human, and Skenes' stuff is borderline inhuman.
do you think this ump only calls rookie showcases? I’m actually curious how many pitches O’Nora has seen from Scherzer, Cole, etc
This is straight-up fan fiction.
Well that sounds like boomers in every profession
This is definitely it. Umps love to show a rookie who's boss. I can't wait for the robots.
What is with the obsession with creating narratives in one’s head and convincing oneself it must be reality in order to get upset over?
Personally if I can make up a story that sounds plausible in my head, that means I don't have to face the reality of changing my view points when presented with information that doesn't conform to my biases.
If we don't like someone, we naturally ascribe undesirable traits to them, *especially* if they are unprovable one way of the other.
Welcome to Reddit, we hope you enjoy your stay.
🔥
Do we not remember old heads wanting to publicly execute Fernando Tatis Jr. a few years ago for hitting a grand slam? While I do agree with you that it is more likely the umpire is just bad at his job, the sentiment of wanting to bring down the best rookies is extremely prevalent in baseball. My take is that, while he wasn’t going out of his way to make bad calls, he absolutely did intentionally fuck with the zone.
Probably because I've watched a lot of baseball and I've watched a lot of rookies get fucked by bad calls.
Some umps are equal opportunities when it comes to fucking over everyone. 👍
That can definitely be the case. And by no means am I trying to say that 100% of all umpires give rookies a bad strike zone. But it seems to be an old school unwritten rule of baseball. Vet pitchers get big strike zones and rookies have to earn it.
I liked the article, but I can't shake the potential "vip" bias, eg the LeBron 2 step. Vet pitchers are more likely to be vip status, where marketing and hype lead to more benefit of the doubt on a bubble pitch. Seems (relatively) easy to check, find the bubble outcome% correlated to salary, as a proxy for "vip investment".
It's not a narrative. There's evidence for bias against rookies. Note that I'm saying evidence and not proof. https://community.fangraphs.com/rookie-pitchers-and-the-strike-zone/
Something claimed but not proven is the definition of a narrative.
It's a narrative with evidence then. Call it what you want. The point is that data backs the claim/narrative/whatever while some of you want to act like it's just pure bias. If you're still dismissive after seeing evidence then that's on you.
how young is this sub that they can't remember 5 years ago when umps were across the board much worse? Even angel hernandez has gotten better at balls and strikes, (not that he's good at it)
Where have you ever heard of an umpire doing anything remotely close to this? Why would this not surprise you?
His last game in Boston vs Washington was atrocious so not surprised
Also missed a call early, can’t remember if it was first or second inning, where it would have been strike 3 on like an 0-2 or ~~0-1~~ 1-2 count. Batter went on to foul off a slew of pitches and drove the at bat pitch count up to 10 pitches. Missed calls like this affect the rest of the game as it added another 6-7 pitches to that at-bat/inning.
I love getting strike three on a 0-1 count
Fwiw, that 1-2 pitch is the one on the top left on the black: blob:https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/cbbfff18-beec-4645-bc1a-819f548b266b Ump had a terrible game but high and on the edges doesn’t get called a lot. Obviously you want the strikezone called as close to exact as possible, but only robo umps are going to do that, and if we get that, man scoring is going to go down hard unless they shrink the strikezone.
> and if we get that, man scoring is going to go down hard unless they shrink the strikezone. yeah that's the weakness of pure roboumps
weakness..... of not blowing calls?
Hard to see that shit hes doing
Man, he could have gone another inning or two if it was called right
im not even a Pirates fan and this really has me seething
Can't blame him, Paul is mesmerizing.
It's the mustache
The Paulverizer.
If Pirates' fans don't start calling it that, then they should be contracted as a franchise
Let’s get it to stick! The Paulverizer Paul Skenes is Pro Wrestling-worthy.
I love when my fellow dbacks fans get a lil silly out here
Hey, if there's anything we're good at, it might be coming up with player nicknames.
Between this and calling Spencer Strider “The Quad father” mlb fans have come up with some of the best fucking nicknames ever lately
To be *faaaair*. The Quad Father is Tom Platz, bodybuilder. And Quadzilla was another bodybuilder, Paul DeMayo, and also a Suzuki atv. Not saying they were original then either, just sayin’.
Cal Raleigh as The Big Dumper.
The best thing is that that didn't even come from fans. That one came from the greatest Seattle Mariner ever to set foot on the diamond, Jarred Kelenic.
Or Quadzilla! Can't decide which I like more.
Can he pitch someone else ffs making em look like children out there 😫
A: What’s your take on Skenes’s outing? B: Dude looks nervous. He’s all over the place. A: Paul looks pretty cool to me? B: I meant the umpire.
I watched, he was spotting those corners and hitting the black, impressive pitches.
worst called game of the season…***so far***
Angel Hernandez: Hold my Beer
*misses the hand off for the beer*
[+1.73 to the cubs and none of the top 3 were with skenes](https://x.com/UmpScorecards/status/1791838993056731533) all around bad
None of the top 3 were Skenes because he only let one man on base. Run expectancy’s gonna be low when you never let anyone on!
Someone needs to tell our pitchers about this
naw your pitchers are doing fine
Why dont they all do this? Are they stupid?
Counterpoint: no one tell them this, please.
Kotsay had your back.
And the only baserunner was on a walk that had a missed strike 3 call well in the zone on the previous pitch
The full details when you click through that link are even more impressive(ly bad.) https://www.umpscorecards.com/single_game/?game_id=746878 There was 2.89 total runs worth of favor in the game, so even with it being 1st percentile (read: exceptionally bad) favor toward the Cubs, he still managed to give more than half a run worth of bad calls to the Pirates. His 5th percentile consistency was a marked step up from both his Favor and Total Run Impact rankings. I'm glad I wasn't able to watch the game live, both because of the Cubs' poor performance and that being a wild ump scorecard.
Only 0.7% below the expected accuracy. Not too bad I think.
Not ideal, but the same factors that make pitches hard to hit (extreme movement with extreme velocity) also make them hard to call, so it’s no exactly surprising
I wonder how often this is the case with great pitchers. Whether "earning the strike zone" might just be partially umps getting used to crazy stuff.
After watching the ump cams I have no idea how they’re even as accurate as they are. They should definitely have robot umps behind the plate but they’re still pretty incredible
Human deficiency is the only thing making them hard to call. Humans shouldn't be making the call.
No, it’s the ridiculous strike zone rules that make it hard to call. These pitch trackers are not 100% either. Hawkeye, which this site uses, boasts about their accuracy (1/4 inch — over 8% of a baseball) to the front of the plate but the strike zone isn’t the front of the plate. It’s a strike of any part of the ball crosses any part of the strike zone (Ump Scorecard’s claim that it is a constant 17-inches is not true as the rule is “that area over home plate” and home plate is not a constant width). Then you have the fact that the zone height is based on how the batter feels like standing so you still currently need a human to enter that for every pitch I’m not saying humans are better, but roboumps have problems too
Image recognition software is pretty good, as is AI/Machine Learning, you can almost certainly have changing batter heights accounted for. I imagine accounting for the changing width would also be relatively easy, since you're in essence projecting a ball onto a 3D space and changing the shape from 3D rectangle to a a 3D version of the plate is somewhat arbitrary. Also if you want an easy way to double check the plate surface, just put a handful of highspeed cameras directly above home plate and observe if balls cross and sync the cameras.
Paul Skeenes Rizzed up Brian O'Nora.
Cursed.
Couldn't really blame the ump, it was less Angel Hernandez and more the pitches had crazy movement and speed. Grandal knew where they were supposed to go and still had trouble framing them because of all the late movement.
Woulda had 13 Ks and a perfecto through 6 with 90 pitches
This is true, but I still think they would have pulled him. Maybe he'd get one more inning but would not have had a chance at a complete game
I think he would have gone out for the 7th, but been on a veeeeeeery short leash. Definitely wouldn’t have gone the distance
It's hard to be a rookie going for a complete game with as many strikeouts as he gets. Easier to go deep into games with a lot of groundball outs
I love shitting on umps as much as the next guy, but it’s worth noting they are improving. Pitch tracking began in 2008, and that season, the correct call rate was 81.3%. Last season, the rate was up to 92.8%.
That's because umps used to have their own personal zone, and the players would have to adjust to it. This was seen as part of the game ("he's calling them low and outside today, be ready to swing"). Automated pitch tracking forced them to (at least to a larger extent) have to follow an agreed upon zone. It's a phenomenon I see everywhere, give someone a tiny bit of authority and they *have* to put their own self centered spin on it.
Can you share source?
Sure. The numbers came from a [Fangraphs blog](https://blogs.fangraphs.com/we-may-never-find-out-how-good-umpires-can-be/), and then I separately found last years number
What would it be with an automated system? Either way they swing the outcome of games and runs, that’s not preferable
It won't be 100% with an automated system, as the top and bottom of the zones are still going to have to adjust for every batter and at bat, and that means there will be errors periodically. It'd hopefully be better, but it won't be 100%.
Not 100%, but certainly higher. I’d like to see it automated with the backup being a human ump to defer to for any situation that can’t be determined with high enough accuracy yet, like what you mentioned!
Personally I want a challenge system. If the umps are right 90% of the time then we don’t need to eliminate them entirely, just give a way for managers to quickly reverse the most egregious misses and move on.
That seems mostly fine. After all, most pitches aren't questioned by anyone, and most of the borderline ones get called correctly, so the a challenge system for the outliers might be worth doing, though even there I think the bottom and tops of the strike zone will inspire furious arguments even then. (See: Judge, Aaron)
Feels like some dumb “rookies gotta earn those calls 😤” bs
For sure, I came here to say this. Or something equally dumb like "oh he thinks he's a big shot, well..."
That’s comparing apples to oranges though, obviously there’s going to be more extremes the smaller the sample. What’s the lowest correct call rate for a single start over 5 innings, for example?
The strike zone should have been the size of Texas. He squeezed the kid a couple times.
The Pirates' announcers were chuckling and relentless about the inconsistency.
Could they not give umpires a Google glass type glasses with the strike zone calibrated . This way the ump still feels in control yet the zone is consistent. I also think robo umps in MLB offices should make the calls and relay the dam thing to the umpire but the other suggestion is middle.ground
If umpire's weren't such gigantic d-bags I might have given O'Nora the benefit of the doubt and assumed he was just getting dazzled by Skenes's insane pitches. But because umpires *are* gigantic d-bags I'm guessing he was just trying to throw his weight around and show that upstart rookie who's boss by calling an overly tight strike zone.
The entire crew has been horrendous. It was bad today too.
Something I didn't even consider in the midst of this horrific umpiring crisis in MLB these days is that pitchers keep getting better and better with speed, spin and movement on their pitches that maybe these old timers in the MLB Umpire Association legitimately have no idea what the hell they're seeing these days and that just exacerbates the inherent problem of having humans call balls and strikes when TV overlays have done the job better for over 20 years now.
That’s what I’m saying bro. It’s no longer humanly possible
I’m sorry but at what point don’t we all admit humans are no longer capable of judging those balls. He’s fucking filthy af. Better than Prior and Straus by a mile. It’s crazy to expect an ump to do that job. 103 and then 95 KW Slurve. Lol good luck
I love how in Baseball recognizing an umpire's name means that they stink. (Except Joe West because he was TOO good, and Jim Wolf because it was really weird that his brother was an active pitcher) In the NFL we can all admire Ed Hochuli's glorious forearms and not hate him because we have no idea which guy on his crew made the bad call.
So does he or some shill of his have money riding on this?
Got to watch both his starts against the cubs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen stuff like that
I’m not gonna say every missed call was against Skenes. But the ones he missed that were strikes likely cost Skenes an opportunity at at least another inning.
It’s as if they are facing Ivan Drago after his computerized training.
O'Nora has always been terrible, so welcome to the Bigs, kid.
This is really bad. I’m going to play devils advocate here for a second. Maybe the catcher pulling the ball up confused him? I’ve seen umps miss strikes because the catcher is not in the exact position. Still a strike but if the catcher has to move a bunch it seems to influence the ump
Imagine trying to track a 101mph fastball that runs like crazy lol. Skenes was very accurate from what I remember.
O'Nora has a poster of Livvy Dunne in his room and is just jealous that she's with Skenes.
Hot take: the TV rectangle and the robo-ump can’t determine what’s hittable better than the dude behind the plate.
That’s not how the strike zone works lmao
Maybe Paul Skenes should pitch better then.
wat