1 in 5 wrong? Really?

[MD Longhorn]

Originally Posted by MrUmpire

God, how I hate the way the media uses statistics. Remember what they are talking about is 20% of the 1.3 close calls per game, not 20% of all calls. This will, in reality, equate to less than 5% of total calls. Right where the figure has been estimated for years.

This data will, no doubt, be misinterpreted by fans, managers, coaches and talking heads.

Your math is off. WAY off. Consider a normal game - 54 outs, let's say 15 strikeouts - 39 non-K outs. That's at least 39 total calls (yeah, some are easy ... but see below). Add in all the safe plays where there was a play (either on a close catch or a close play at a base), etc - let's call it 50 although it's probably more like 70.

20% of 1.3 calls a game is .26 calls a game. Out of 50, this is not 5%ish - it's 0.5%. Meaning that out of 1000 calls, they miss 5, and 2 more are undeterminable even via replay.

The other fallacy of the logic is removing "non-close" plays or obvious plays. You can't judge any sort of percentage by arbitrarily effing with the denominator. This is as dumb as saying, "of all the calls that were either wrong or too close to call, the umpire missed SIXTY PERCENT of them."

Oh, and I can't wait for football, where there are 100's of decisions made by the 5-7 officials on EVERY PLAY. What is going to count as a close play? A non-hold that wasn't called? A NZ enfraction, where there was one? This one is going to be impossible to judge. And basketball even worse.