Hok Talk: Picking on umpires

Photo by Jason O. Watson/Getty Images Jorge Soler has been arguing with umpires all year long.This year FanGraphs caused quite a stir when they updated their version of the WAR stat for catchers. They started taking a catcher’s framing ability - his ability to convince an umpire to call more strikes - into account. Some people think framing is overrated. Others wonder, if it’s so effective, why baseball officials, statisticians, and fans seem to simply be OK with the fact that catchers are manipulating the strike zone when they shouldn’t have any impact whatsoever by the rulebook. And everyone wondered just how many calls umpires were getting wrong.

Then, yesterday, there was an argument in…