MLB’s latest pitch to umps way off base

The idea wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. It was an idea attempting to substantively measure if MLB umpires were adhering to this year’s effort to call the strike zone by the rulebook.

MLB vice president Sandy Alderson was looking at the pitch count for each umpire working the plate. If an umpire significantly exceeds the average for all MLB umpires, Alderson believed it was an indication that umpires were not adhering to the effort to have more strikes called.

Thankfully, baseball came to its senses Wednesday night when the commissioner’s office said it wouldn’t use pitch counts to evaluate umpires’ performance.

As one MLB officer said to me, “This idea should have been run by a few people before it got out there.” It wasn’t, and thus came the firestorm. Alderson’s concept on its face had merit, but once you go below the superficial, it was a scary and bad idea.

If Pedro Martinez pitches against Greg Maddux, the plate umpire’s pitch count is going to look great, and won’t tell you a darn thing about his strike zone. Those pitchers only throw strikes. It’s a cakewalk for the ump.

On the other hand, if Tim Wakefield is pitching against Kenny Rogers, the pitch count will look brutal even if the ump uses the defined zone and then some. Those pitchers are 3-2 on everybody.

Any umpire’s pitch count for a season is largely dependent on who pitches the days he’s behind the plate. Furthermore, to begin evaluating umps on a count midway through the season means an umpire has at most worked only 19 games behind the plate. That’s not much of a cross section of pitchers and games.

Worse yet was the mindset such an idea insidiously created. Alderson said pitch counts would be used as part of the umpire evaluation process and that would have affected who received postseason work. As with the players, postseason is highly coveted by the umps.

Baseball’s bad idea meant that umpires, in the course of games, would have a concern for how many pitches had been thrown. If the count is high, does that mean they’re doing a bad job and need to call a few more strikes to get the figure down? Talk about messing with the mind of an ump. In this sense, Alderson’s idea attacked the integrity of the game.

Nearly every player in the majors will tell you that umps still have a strike zone that reflects how they have called it in the past. That is a comfort zone, one that reflects how they believe they can be most consistent during a game and most nearly comply with the rulebook definition.

It is a time-honored truism in the game that players ask one thing of the home plate ump; consistency with the strike zone for nine innings. Hitters and pitchers will adjust to the umpire so long as they know what’s a strike in the first will be a strike in the ninth.

The ultimate concern of MLB was reducing the time of games. The ultimate problem was not the pitch counts, but the two-minute commercial breaks for television every half inning.

That “problem” is not going away. That “problem” is about money made by the broadcasters that translates into more money for the teams when they sell broadcast rights.

The pitch count idea needs to be buried real deep. It was one case in which hollering at the ump was a really bad idea.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and NBC sportscaster.