Fuck Dusty Baker.
He’s not responsible for all of this team’s woes, but he’s a shitty leader and an even shittier gameday coach.
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This series wasn’t a sweep, it was an absolute bitch slapping of historic proportions.
Orioles only had 1 road win since May 5? Nice job Astros.
Multiple comments of “this is the worst I’ve ever seen”
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“That’s not a strike zone, that’s a strike region”
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The suggestion that Bucknor someone increased the run differential in the Astros favor is completely laughable, considering he gifted the Orioles four runs in the 1st inning, and ran Garcia out of the game after the 4th. Whomever calculated that is as incompetent as C.B. Bucknor.
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That struck me as odd too. He was terrible for both sides, but the damage he did to Garcia was significantly more (see two of the three most important fuckups on the scorecard). Has the author ever explained the methodology for computing the run differential?
It has to be context-neutral, right? No way to end up with that result unless it ignores baserunners and number of outs.
There are 288 possible base runner, out, count combinations [8 possible base states, 0, 1, or 2 outs, and 12 different counts]. Each one of these has a unique run expectancy, or the number of runs a team is expected to score from that instance until the end of the inning. To calculate run expectancy effects, I simply find the difference between a team’s run expectancy with and without a given bad call. For a more in depth explanation, read the article I wrote for FanGraphs here.
So, for example, there’s no way to take into account any potential innings Garcia lost because of the ridiculous first inning. It’s not a perfect system, of course, it’s just a standardized formula that takes any judgement out of it.
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The link above goes to this article, which is a much deeper dive: The Effect of Umpires on Baseball: Umpire Runs Created (uRC) | Community Blog
So in short, there is no good method for estimating this number. If they use a results-dependent methodology, it weighs bad calls differently dependent on outcome, and waters down the calls in total. If they use results-independent methodology it ignores the actual effect the umpire had in favor of a hypothetical. The latter appears to be how Bucknor was credited with cheating the Orioles out of runs last night. Which is absurd on its face.
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Exactly.
The “equation” is not based on the actual outcomes of the calls overall, but individually based on other possible results.
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