Chicago Cubs Manager Joe Maddon is excused by the 5th Inning

Chicago Cubs Manager Joe Maddon is bounced by Mike Estabrook over ball-strike calls, almost none of which had much bearing on the game’s outcome.

Plate umpire Mike Estabrook ejected Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon during the fifth inning of Chicago’s 2-0 victory over Pittsburgh Thursday night at Wrigley Field.

There wasn’t much question why Estabrook ejected Maddon. The Cubs’ bench had been on the plate umpire’s ball-strike calls, Estabrook made it plain he’d had enough, and once Maddon advanced onto the field Estabrook waited only long enough to verify that Maddon wanted to continue the discussion before thumbing him.

Umpires have ejected managers for that particular sin for decades, sometimes without even giving them a warning, as Estabrook appeared to do. So the surprise wasn’t that Maddon was bounced. The mystery was why the Cubs were particularly miffed about Estabrook’s strike zone to begin with.

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According to MLB’s Pitch Trax system, Estabrook was having a decent, if not exceptional, game when Maddon decided he’d had enough. To that point, Estabrook had been required to make 62 ball-strike calls and he had made 56 of them correctly, a 90 percent accuracy rate that’s only fractionally off the major league average.

On borderline calls, he was less on target. Of Estabrook’s 62 calls, 21 were on pitches within a ball’s width of the strike zone’s border. He called 11 of them correctly, a 52 percent rate that was sub-standard.

But if Maddon was upset at Estabrook’s lack of precision on those close calls, he was pursuing a point of academic value at best. Only a handful of those bad calls had situational influence – that is they either altered an at-bat’s outcome or put a player at a distinct disadvantage. And while that disadvantage fell marginally against the Cubs, the influence was hardly sufficient to prompt a manager to risk an ejection.

From the outside, it’s impossible to know the dugout dynamic. But given the statistical facts, it’s fair to wonder whether Maddon allowed himself to be ejected in order to demonstrate to one of his players – irked by a real or imagined bad call against him – that Joe had that player’s back.

Two of Estabrook’s ball-strike misses had real consequences for the game’s outcome, but those calls offset one another.

In the first inning, Pittsburgh catcher Francisco Cervelli was called out by Estabrook on an 0-2 pitch that broke just below the strike zone.

Two innings later, Daniel Descalso took a first-pitch called strike that fell barely below the knees. Two pitches later, Descalso was called out on another close pitch, although this one was called correctly.

Those two pitches may have triggered Maddon’s differences with Estabrook. In the same inning Chicago Cubs pitcher Jose Quintana took a one ball pitch below the knees that Estabrook called a strike. Like Descalso, Quintana was called out two pitches later on a third strike that did barely catch the bottom of the zone.

One inning later, Kris Bryant took a one ball pitch just off the plate that Estabrook called a strike. Bryant flied out on the next pitch.

So by Maddon’s ejection in the bottom of the fifth, the Cubs had seen what to them may have appeared to be several borderline low or outside pitches that Estabrook had called against them. In what at the time was a 0-0 game, those calls might have been crucial.

The irony is that during that fifth inning, Estabrook made only one bad ball-strike call, and it helped the Cubs. With a two-ball count, Jason Heyward took a pitch up in the strike zone that Estabrook called ball three. Heyward walked on the next pitch. One Descalso single later, Maddon was gone.

Descalso’s presence in the batter’s box may not have been coincidental. Considering that an Estabrook missed call contributed to Descalso’s third-inning strikeout, the manager may have felt that his intervention with Estabrook – even at the risk of a certain ejection – prevented Descalso from taking matters into his own hands.

With bench coach Mark Loretta managing in Maddon’s place, the Chicago Cubs went on to beat Pittsburgh 2-0.