Calling balls and strikes is not easy. Some umpires are better than others, of course. Major League hitters appear to have a better eye of for the strike zone than umpires do, and that’s a problem. As much as Bronx Cheer likes to defend umpires, sometimes it can’t. Wendelstedt had a terrible game on Thursday. Baseball has made great strides in cracking down on the strike zone, but it needs to do more. The Twins, not the umpires, probably lost the game Thursday night, but the uncertainty in that statement reflects a problem.

By isolating the discussion on the 1-2 pitch to Berkman, the media do themselves and the larger point a disservice. The controversy is not about that one missed pitch. Any umpire can miss one pitch. The problem lies in Wendelstedt’s terrible strike zone all night. He called a pitch right down the middle a ball. Jeff Passan has a good, if Twins-slanted, takedown. A strike zone that bad cannot happen in a playoff game.

– Tom Boorstein, SNY.tv.

Boorstein is, as he explained here, as big a fan, follower and defender of sports officials as anyone I’ve ever met. It’s pretty weird. But it appears the umpiring and instant replay discussion is going to keep coming up until some sort of clear resolution is reached, and clear resolutions have never been the forte of Bud Selig’s office. So Tom’s a pretty good guy to go to for this stuff since he’s been following umpiring since way before it was cool.

It strikes me — pardon the pun — that ball-and-strikes duties are the aspect of umpiring that could most easily be replaced by computers or a robot, and it wouldn’t even require cutting back the number of umpires since you’d still need a guy standing there to make calls at home plate and rule on hit batsmen and checked swings, etc.

Probably not something that will happen soon or be implemented without hiccups. And I’m not even sure it’s something that should happen; I really haven’t thought it all the way through.

But Major League Baseball has to find a way to diminish umpire error if it’s affecting the strike zone so much that it impacts the outcome of games. Yes, the human element is part of the game and all that. But no one’s arguing that the players be replaced by machines (although Transformers baseball would be pretty awesome to watch). It’s just about making baseball more fair for the humans competing in it.

Also — and Tom doesn’t get at this, but I’ve discussed it before — I’m shocked by how many people seem certain that umpiring has gotten worse and how few consider that umpiring may have been equally bad forever and we’ve only recently come into new technologies that allow us to more thoroughly and frequently judge the way the game is called.

Now we watch games in high definition with a dozen super-slow-mo replay angles. We see for certain when umpires are wrong on calls we might have shrugged off as questionable or close just a few years ago.

I’m curious how this is going to work out. Shields has always had good peripherals, but his ERA has been higher than his FIP and xFIP for his entire career. Things like fly ball to home run rate and BABIP are subjected to a lot of randomness, but that randomness is sometimes overstated. They’re not TOTALLY random. It’s not a complete fluke that his ERA has been higher than his other numbers would suggest.

At the very least, I find it interesting that a major league team is not only willing to look past the surface numbers, but openly admits to doing so. So if you’re into that whole revenge of the nerds thing, i suppose you might want to root for the Rays and Big Game James tonight.

– Patrick Flood, Exile on 126th St.

Like Patrick said, it’s pretty great that Maddon is willing to explain that he’s pitching Shields this afternoon because of defense-independent pitching statistics when he could easily say, “oh, well of course we’re going with Shields here, he’s ‘Big Game James,'” and meet with a lot less resistance from the majority of fans and the media.

All that said, I struggle a little bit with xFIP, as I’ve mentioned here on a few occasions. I have no doubt it’s a useful tool and that most pitchers’ HR/FB rate eventually, with a large enough sample, should normalize somewhere near the league average.

But if I could wonder if perhaps Johan Santana was reliably yielding weak fly-ball contact this season when his xFIP was way above his ERA, I must allow that there’s a chance Shields consistently yields stronger-than-average fly-ball contact.

I’m probably fighting a strawman here because I don’t think anyone who really thought it through would pretend xFIP is the be-all end-all of pitching statistics, but do I see it sometimes bandied about like gospel, and I suspect there’s still a lot more work to be done in divorcing the pitcher on the mound from the defense behind him and the randomness inherent in the sport.

All that said, I’m still rooting for the Rays. Obviously.