“I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”
I responded to a poll this morning. Nothing unusual about that. Usually my baseball thinking is right in there with the others, but this one surprised me. This one asked what to do about umpires who consistently made bad calls
Here’s the preface to the poll:
“Should umpires be subject to performance-based punishment? Should a high-profile missed call subject an umpire to suspension, fines or even demotion? Or, perhaps, should MLB raise the league minimum for umpires to $480,000, to match their player minimum, so that umpires do have a financial incentive for such scrutiny?”
The responses were overwhelmingly in favor of, you guessed it, doing nothing! The article, written by Curtis Granderson in the New York Times, was posted in Close Call Sports, linked here. It’s a good read. Take a look and see what you think.
Related articles
- Why Jim Leyland Is Right: MLB Needs to Hold Umpires More Accountable (bleacherreport.com)
- Shoddy Umpiring Making a Tough Detroit Tigers Season Even More Trying (thedetroitsportssite.com)
- Leyland begs media to make umpires ‘accountable’ for bad calls (VIDEO) (sports.yahoo.com)
- Blown baseball calls: We’ve seen enough (standard.net)
- MLB suspends umpire Bob Davidson and Phillies’ Charlie Manuel (cbssports.com)
Garlicfriesandbaseball's Blog 
Umpires at the professional level should be evaluated each year and either hired back or not. That’s all.
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I agree with amateurumpire. Umpires, like players, should be evaluated each year to see if they are still the top ranked umpires and to see if they should stay at the MLB level. It’s the only way to keep up the quality.
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Thanks for the comment. Sounds good enough, but who’d be in charge of the evaluations? Surely not the MLB, owners, players, managers, etc. It seems logical the MLUA would have responsibility for this task, which presents a whole new can of worms.
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