Regardless of whether which MLB team you root for, there’s one team on the field that most fans can agree is not among their favorites: The umpires.
Whether a call is actually against your team or for your team, there’s a large group of people that are not happy with umpires.
They can get 98 percent of the calls correct and one of their four calls (out of 172) nearly be the difference between one team winning and one team losing. And that one game could be the one game that separates those same two teams at the end of playing 162 games.
Umpire Gabe Morales, who is one of the best home plate umpires in baseball in 2020 (he was eighth-best among the 74 full-time MLB umpires that umpired at least one game behind the plate in 2021, per UmpScorecards) but he had that happen for him in June.
He also had that happen to him in Game 5 of the NLDS between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants on a check-swing call at first base. Here’s a side note: If MLB awarded postseason assignments to umpires more on merit, Morales wouldn’t have been at first base in Game 5 because he would have had a plate assignment in the series. He was also one of the best umpires on the bases in 2021, as he was overturned just three times on replay in 15 reviews. The average umpire was overturned seven times.
But a “checked swing” call is completely a judgment call, as there is not a word in the 154-page rulebook (excluding the index and appendices) for 2021 about what a check swing is.
That is part of the reason why a few things need to be changed for 2022 regarding umpires and it will help fans throughout baseball and it will also help the umpires as well.
Here are 5 things we would love to see MLB umpires have tweaked for the 2022 season
1. Define what a “checked swing” is
It’s not defined in the rule book so umpires have to decide what they think it is. Officially, MLB says a ball is when “a pitch … is not struck at by the batter” and a strike is when a pitch “s struck at by the batter.”
Instead of having a judgment call on that, make it a rule enforcement. It could be the wrists breaking, the bat going past home plate (both of which are often used to determine a swing), or something else.
This play is also not reviewable, which leads to our second need for change.