Umpires against the Pirates: Who ya got?

Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports “I do NOT have a wavering strike zone! Well, maybe not today.”As long as baseball has existed, complaints about umpire calls have existed. One of my strongest memories about my father is him moaning about missed calls during seemingly every single game I watched with him. It didn’t matter who was playing, the umpire was inevitably a bum who should have been run out of the game.

During Sunday’s game thread, there was a discussion about the, um, fluidity of the strike zone against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Bucs Dugout Commentariat member Bishop1973 mentioned that he did a Statcast search for the first half of the 2019 season. I’ll let him share his findings:

I…