The CB Bucknor Experience
Everyone has bad days at work. You’ve had them. If you read my work, you sure as heck know I’ve had them. Even Mike Trout’s theoretically had one or two. Not everyone can be on top of his or her game at every second of every minute on the clock. It’s just a simple fact of life.
CB Bucknor seems to have these nights more often than most. Any cursory poll asking for the names of the worst umpires in the big leagues will yield Bucknor’s name as one of the most popular answers. Less cursory polls have produced a similar result. He has long been at the center of some of baseball’s more frustrating officiating experiences, whether it be with his work behind the plate or on the bases. It was the former that drew the ire of just about everyone in Cobb County last night, especially that of Jayson Werth.
Werth, at this stage of his career, has fully bought into the Danny Glover-in-Lethal–Weapon method of thinking. He’s too old for your crap, and he’s been here long enough to tell you why you’re wrong. It’s a pretty fun thing to behold, especially when he’s had it up to here with whatever injustice has been perpetrated that day. The crap, in Werth’s estimation, began with his fourth-inning plate appearance. Here’s a graph of the pitches from same. (Note: from catcher’s perspective.)
He struck out. BrooksBaseball and PitchInfo think the third pitch was a strike, and video from last night shows that it was borderline, but not an egregious call.
Strikes two and three, however, were bad. Very bad.
These were the most egregious calls (in terms of balls and strikes) on the night. There were too many borderline calls for comfort, but we can’t get into every one of them here. What we can get into, however, is how the game ended. Or, rather, how it didn’t end.
It’s the ninth inning. Shawn Kelley is on the mound following a sloppy outing from Blake Treinen. The bases are loaded, and Chase d’Arnaud is at the plate with two strikes. Kelley throws a looping breaking ball on the outer portion of the plate, d’Arnaud feebly swings, and that’s the ballgame. Right? You’d think that would be the case.
There’s so much to unpack here. First and foremost, what exactly is a foul ball?
The official rules of Major League Baseball define a foul ball thusly:
A FOUL BALL is a batted ball that settles on foul territory between home and first base, or between home and third base, or that bounds past first or third base on or over foul territory, or that first falls on foul territory beyond first or third base, or that, while on or over foul territory, touches the person of an umpire or player, or any object foreign to the natural ground. A foul fly shall be judged according to the relative position of the ball and the foul line, including the foul pole, and not as to whether the infielder is on foul or fair territory at the time he touches the ball.
As with a lot of the rules of baseball, there’s a fun little bit of grey area there, namely when it comes to foul balls around the plate. Yet the key phrase here is “batted ball” and, quite clearly, d’Arnaud did not apply bat to ball on what would have been Kelley’s final pitch of the evening. Perhaps Bucknor assumed that because Matt Wieters didn’t cleanly catch the ball that d’Arnaud must have gotten a piece of it. Perhaps the thump of the ball off of Wieters’ mitt was mistaken for the crack of a bat hitting a ball. Perhaps Bucknor is a thinker of a higher order, attempting to provide a commentary on life and on baseball. We have rules that define things for us, but really, at the end of the day, what is a foul ball? Does it really matter in the end, when the cold grip of death, at some point, comes for us all? Do squabbles over what is and is not foul matter at that point?
Regardless, the-foul-that-wasn’t wasn’t clarified to be a “foul” until after the grounds crew had already begun their post-game duties and the handshake procession of players was already in progress. Rather fittingly, when everyone was ordered back to their places, Kelley threw d’Arnaud another breaking ball, and the Nationals won, again. Werth made sure to tell Bucknor exactly what he thought, and he told reporters too.
Jayson Werth's full quote on the end-of-game umpiring tonight… pic.twitter.com/Q24LU7F0qy
— Mark Zuckerman (@MarkZuckerman) April 19, 2017
However, it’s only April 19th. We’ve got a lot of baseball left. A lot of those games will be called by Bucknor. It’s never a good idea to peak too early.
Nick is a columnist at FanGraphs, and has written previously for Baseball Prospectus and Beyond the Box Score. Yes, he hates your favorite team, just like Joe Buck. You can follow him on Twitter at @StelliniTweets, and can contact him at stellinin1 at gmail.
Is it bad that I actually forgot how bad Bucknor is because I’m so used to Joe West screwing the Indians?
Joe West screws everyone, everywhere, all the time. He even tossed a player in a spring training game.
In ‘Ball Four’ Bouton wrote about players trying to get tossed from spring training games, so they could chill rather than play another of too many meaningless games. I’d be inclined to not blame Joe for tossing a guy in spring training.
To Red Sox fans Joe West is a hero. It was he who correctly reversed two crucial calls in the great Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS. First on Jim Joyce’s blunder on Mark Bellhorn’s HR in the 4th, then on Randy Marsh’s missed call on the egregious Alex Rodriguez slap play. As the saying goes, “It all depends on where you sit”.
Randy Marsh? Really?
When told his call was incorrect, he reportedly responded “I’m not allowed to call what I want? I’m sorry, I thought this was America.”
If you are a Red Sox fan you know who made every call in the 2004 ALCS.
Joe West isn’t bad in terms of making calls behind the plate accurately and consistently (or in the field, for that matter). His terribleness is that he likes being the ump-show and is incredibly thin-skinned about being questioned or reversed on the inevitable mistakes that crop up over the long season. It’s magnified by the fact that as the Grand Poohbah of the ump union, he has complete job security and is completely shielded from any consequences.
Most definitely on both counts. He is a showboater and a buffoon but there is a reason he appears in most of the post-seasons. He grades out very highly.
Surprised to not see Bob Davidson mentioned.
Davidson at least had the sense to hang it up after last season.
I was watching this game, and even though I’m a Braves fan, I was actually glad when Chase struck out after that egregious foul tip call, felt fair. Somewhat lost in all of this is that it was a well played game with good performances by both Starting Pitchers. It would have been a shame to see the result further marred by umpire related controversy.
Pathetic. Wish the league would do something about these types of things, but nothing’s going to happen
I bet they will this time, a la eventually with Eric Gregg, after a politically convenient interval. Perhaps not till the end of the season, during some normal and union-agreed-upon formal assessment period.
Begs the question of what an ump would have to do to actually lose his job? Probably nothing short of grabbing the bat out of the batter’s hand and pummeling the catcher with it, followed by streaking and then taking a dump on home plate. Even then, if no one dies, he’s probably fine.
misusing their plane tickets does it. Nothing on the field, though
As John Hirschbeck has proven, you can semi-regularly toss racial slurs at players and face absolutely zero consequences.
As someone who watched the whole game, he was garbage from start to finish for both sides. I never thought I’d agree with Werth but he has every right to be annoyed. Bucknor was just an embarrassment. The Braves seemed to benefit from his ineptitude but even their announcers were openly talking about how terrible he is.
“I’ve seen worse strikezones at a Braves game.”
– Eric Gregg
too soon
I saw a game earlier this year where Bucknor was calling pitches balls that were in the strike zone – equally frustrating, if not more so, for the pitcher. Yeah, unfortunately, he seems pretty bad at calling balls and strikes. The foul tip was bad too. Maybe he should get all of his senses checked. And figure out where to perch (how far left or right of the catcher) to sort out a fair way of calling balls & strikes.
He did that last night also. The article links only Werth’s single at bat, but the whole game was gawdawful:
https://goo.gl/2qlNGY
I feel like the strike zone has been worse this year than in years past. I have seen lots of pitches in the zone being called balls. This is 100% based on my eyes and zero hard data. Anything to support or dispel this?
The called third strike to Werth was an abomination. Bucknor clearly let Werth’s body language and whatever he was chirping beneath the beard get to him and rang him up on a pitch nearly 12″ off the plate. No excuses. You can tell by the emphasis that it was personal and he let Werth have it.
Sorry, as an umpire, you need to be bigger than the beef. If teams and players want to carry stuff over from previous games and series, then there is some sort of agenda. But during the heat of the moment, single at bat? Do the job you’re paid for, clown!
The Braves should have equal beef with Bucknor, as some of the called “strikes” from Kelley were also well off the plate and influenced those high leverage at bats.
Yeah, that argument always infuriated me, that a player’s bad attitude was somehow justification for an umpire to make a terrible call. Better not get on the Umpire’s bad side, or he will arbitrarily change the rules of the game to disadvantage you. Seriously, why do we still put up with this line of thinking?
That line of thinking applies to every person in a position of power. It is not unique to umpires! Some people are assholes…
There has to be some sort of complaint procedure for umps, surely? If I were Jayson Werth, I’d not be thrilled at having this guy ump any more my games this season.
Given that video and computers can (much more accurately) enforce the actual rules, one could argue that by now, the only real job of the umpires are to provide the “human element” to the game, which is precisely what Bucknor is doing.
Honest question. I know you can play a game under protest and I have never seen a protest granted but what would have happened on this one. The game clearly would have ended had the correct call been made but I am not exactly clear if this would have been granted had the Nats lost this game.
Zero chance it would have been granted – you can’t protest a judgment call.
Your comment did get me curious about protests though. According to this article, the Giants’ protest of a 2014 game was upheld. First one since 1986 according to the article:
http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/after-first-upheld-protest-since-1986-giants-to-finish-game-with-cubs/
Not baseball, but I know it happened a few years ago in the NBA where the scorekeepers screwed up the foul count on a player and kept him in the game when he had fouled out. (I want to say it was Shaq but I don’t care enough to look it up)
It isn’t a judgement call. It’s an objective, black and white call. Did he make contact with the ball? Yes or no. It isn’t as nebulous as the strike zone. Moot point since the game ended as it did but I’d be furious if I were the Nats and an easily verifiable missed call torpedoed the game.
Nope – it’s a judgment call. Same as ball/strike, out/safe, fair/foul, etc. You can only protest when you believe the umpire has misapplied the rules:
http://m.mlb.com/glossary/rules/protested-game
(Though I note that from the article I linked above, it looks like the last 2 granted protests were because the home team screwed up putting the tarp down during a rain delay causing the game to be called and in both instances, the tarp error benefited the home team.)
I don’t see how allowing four strikes isn’t a misapplication of the rules. Ditto fair/foul, allowing an out of play ball to go for a hit or disallowing a legitimate hit seem like misapplications of the rules. I’m admittedly terrible at parsing legalese, just the way I’m used to hearing the word used, determining whether or not a batter made contact seems objective.
The game would be replayed at a later date, or else restarted from the point of the protested call. The infamous Pine Tar Incident with George Brett and the Royals is a good example.
I believe the famous “Pine Tar” game was overturned due to the Royals’ protest being upheld.
Sorry, I saw someone else already brought this game up below.
A very similar thing happened to Lance McCullers a few days ago (against OAK I think). A batter swung and missed at strike three (by at least 6 inches) only to have the ump rule it a foul ball. The catcher (Gattis) didn’t cleanly catch it. It wasn’t the last out of the game, but a pretty egregious mistake.
I saw that. Very frustrating. And it possibly messed with McCullers’s head, as he gave up 2 homers the next inning. Sure, he should be mentally stronger than that, but still…
How do you jump from a non-foul tip called a foul tip to that shaking his psyche enough for him to give up 2 hrs the next inning.
jump…to conclusions mat
I watched AJ Burnett lose his cool twice in the same season on phantom foul tips. In both cases he allowed a HR right afterwards. I’m having memory trouble for the 1st one, but teh second was vs STL and Mark Reynolds right before the allstar break in 2015.
Memory fools, it was Derek Norris and SD the 1st time earlier that month. Burnett did not give up a HR that time, but did give up 2 hits.
Yeah, I believe the bases were loaded(?) if I recall correctly. Watching that as an A’s fan I was glad it happened, but I also wasn’t upset when Healy struck out again, because that would’ve been pretty unfair had it changed the game.
Did anyone see the same exact thing happen the other night during McCullers start against the Athletics? Scott Barry was the HP umpire. McCullers threw a pitch in the dirt to Healy. Healy missed it by at least the same 3-4 inch margin, wasn’t even close to making contact. Gattis didn’t squeeze it. Barry called it a foul ball. McCullers, Gattis, and Hinch were all going crazy on him.
Neither instance has the HP umpire asked the other umps for help…why?
I saw that… and was wondering the same thing. Maybe it is a pride thing?
You can ask the base ump for help on a checked swing because that’s an angle thing, so they do actually have a better view of it. But on ‘foul/not foul’? Maybe they do there too, but I’d want to see that tested and affirmed first.
The home plate ump is by far the closest to the play and the best person to make the call. The only time the closest ump would ever ask for help is if their view was blocked. Doesn’t happen often because umps are trained to be in proper position to see plays, but I’ve seen it happen.
CB needs to get interested in this “proper position” of which you speak.
Heard the braves TV crew talking about how terrible the ump is and always has been and knew who was behind the plate without seeing it.
I don’t understand why people that are clearly this bad are allowed to continue. Is it a union thing? Dear umpires (lookin at you joe west), if I notice you throughout a game, you are doing your job incorrectly.
Yes, it’s a union thing. No umpire under union protection has been fired for being bad at umpiring since at least 1986, and that guy claims it’s because he was outed as gay.
I’m a union man through and through, but that’s some garbage right there.
He weirdly did the same thing to Leonys Martin on Sunday, in a way. Martin hit a grounder up the first-base line, which Mike Napoli snared with a diving stop. Bucknor put his hands in the air, calling it foul. Then he talked with Napoli and called Martin out. Scott Servais lost his mind and was subsequently ejected.
Bucknor has been exhibiting a pattern of bad calls on foul balls. The following happened in last Sunday’s M’s game. He was the 1st-base ump. Different circumstances, obviously, but just as puzzling. He signals foul, then—seemingly on Napoli’s urging—changes his mind …
http://m.mlb.com/video/v1293296683/?query=servais%2Bejected
Just a few days ago in the Rangers/Mariners game he was at first base and a ball was hit down the line, borderline fair/foul call. Mike Napoli fielded the ball and stepped on first based, but Bucknor made a shrug gesture that was somewhere between “foul ball” and “Gee I don’t know.” Then, after appearing to talk to MIKE NAPOLI, he called the ball fair and the runner out, about 10 seconds after the play was over.
“We have rules that define things for us, but really, at the end of the day, what is a foul ball? Does it really matter in the end, when the cold grip of death, at some point, comes for us all? Do squabbles over what is and is not foul matter at that point?”
so much to unpack… heck with, let’s go eat Arby’s… is almost where i thought this was heading
every single person you’ve ever loved will either go to your funeral or you will go to theirs.
Afterwards, why not go to Arbys?
Not quite true about funerals. Debbie Reynolds, for example, found a way around it.
Ha, joke’s on you. Lots of people you love won’t care enough about you to go to your funeral.
Edit: Scratch that – my mistake, the initial strike zone plot had some extremely poor calls, but they appear to just have been errors and the final plot shows mostly correct calls.
A rare bad article on FG! There were many other calls that were much worse than those two pitches to Werth, contrary to “These were the most egregious calls (in terms of balls and strikes) on the night. “
It’s not a bad article, it’s prelude. Later today we’re going to get “The even scarier CB Buckner calls” and “The scariest CB Buckner calls”.
Watching this unfold last night, I was really looking forward to an in-depth analysis of CB Bucknor at some point today – it seemed like something fangraphs was guaranteed to cover at some level.
Your writing begged a very good, natural question to start this piece… and it’s a question that all your readers are wondering: “CB Bucknor seems to have these nights more often than most.” So, is CB Bucknor a bad umpire?
Well, what’s the answer to that question? If we’re drawing parallels, I think this piece was a blown call – a great opportunity to dive in and answer the overarching question, but instead of taking a base, we get punched out and are left wondering what just happened.
You just got CB Buckner’d
Time to be pedantic: It raised that question, it didn’t beg it.
If you want an example of begging the question, you’d say that this article begs the question of whether bad umpiring calls are bad for baseball (in terms of ratings, interest, etc.). I actually think you could make a case that they aren’t.
Automate the strike zone!
Also, anyone noticed how Nicholas Stellini is really good at expressing outrage? The other piece by him that comes to mind is the Betances-arbitration piece.
How does the pitch mapping work? The plate isn’t one plane, and on paper if a pitch goes through any of the plate, it should be a strike. Looking at strike two, for instance, it might have just nibbled the very front of the plate? I’d love to see an overhead view of those pitches.
(Not defending Bucknor).
Good point. We could easily have a 3d cube with lasers or infrared pointing straight up. That would ensure that the inside/outside and front/back dimensions are correct. This might also be possible with camera/s in the ground or in the plate looking straight up.
Then cameras from center field (or behind home plate?) could easily distinguish up/down.
A computer puts them all together like Hawkeye or SpotShot and we’re done.
I bet within a couple years we could get the ~88% accuracy that umpires have now. And it would probably keep getting better. Even if it doesn’t, at least the players can’t argue with any kind of subjective unfairness.
This would mostly kill homefield advantage, for what it’s worth.
Joe West and Angel Hernandez think CB Bucknor is a tremendous ump.
Bigly.
Just reading the title of this piece made me chuckle.
Bad enough he missed the non-contact; put aside the failure to ask for help (from say the 2nd base ump who has a great view); and consider normal the inability to distinguish the sound of a ball hitting a glove and a ball hitting a wooden bat; what about the batter running to first (only done on a missed swing and never on a foul ball) that perhaps Mr. Bucknor should have noticed? Can’t wait until Mr. Bucknor makes a call this bad on a play more likely to have wajors on it.
hands down the worst ump in the game and has been for years. west may be more of an egomaniac asshole but he’s nowhere near as incompetent.
Yeah, Joe West is an attention whore, CBB is just bad at umpiring.
You may be selling Angel Hernandez short.
Maybe Bucknor has vertigo.
So, I know that as a minority group, the color blind are not really deserving of much in the way of special treatment. That said, I want to share with you (and Brooks Baseball?) that the squares for “Called Strike” and “Ball,” above, are, for me, 100% indistinguishable from one another.
I am red-green color blind, the most common type. People often ask me, “What’s that like?” The way I have come to describe it is, I see colors in normal light like you seem them in the dusk. So you know how you walk by a couple cars in twilight, and you’re not sure, are they dark gray, are they light brown, are they light green? Well, although I see things in the light that everyone sees them, the colors themselves are always dulled, like it’s almost night out.
Anyway, I love reading analyses like these and I wish I didn’t look at a graph like that and just have absolutely no hope of knowing what it says. It might as well be in Cyrillic, seriously. Thank you so much, Fangraphs, for your top-notch analysis. If there’s anything you can do to make things a little easier for people like me, I would be grateful.
For anyone else who wants to get a sense of how indistinguishable these things can look for people who are color blind…
1. Go to contrastchecker.com
2. Enter FF0000 for the foreground color and 00FF00 for the background color.
3. Click the “SEE GRAYSCALE” button. The text and the background become identical shades.
Doesn’t sound from what Regular Potato wrote that it’s exactly what s/he is experiencing, but that’s the idea.
There is no reason that they could not different shapes as well as different colors. Actually, not relying on only color to convey information is something that is taught in beginning user interface design classes.
There is a reason that the red-colored light in traffic lights is larger than the others. Poor design in a graph might not present the same level of danger as a traffic intersection, but there is really no excuse not to do a better job with the graphs, especially now that you’ve made the problem known.
Dan Brooks of Brooks Baseball says that there are colorblind friendly versions of the graphs available. I still think they should use different shapes also.
That strike zone map is of the strike zone as it’s defined by the rulebook. The one in the link below is of the strike zone as it’s called by big-league umpires. You can see that it expands horizontally. Two of the called strikes to Werth were still clearly balls, but they don’t look nearly as bad. The other called strike was pretty clearly the correct call. Bucknor was bad last night, but the strikezone map being used above makes him look even worse.
http://www.brooksbaseball.net/pfxVB/fastmap.php?pitchSel=all&game=gid_2017_04_18_wasmlb_atlmlb_1/&sp_type=3&s_type=7
The “CB Bucknor Experience” is my second-least-favorite Disney Ride, just a tick better than “Race To The Bag (Starring Jim Joyce and Andres Galarraga)”
*Armando
Nick, this is a great post, the best you’ve written yet. If you continue to write like this, you’ll join the top tier with Cameron-Sullivan-Sawchick-Cistulli.
I ranted hard on twitter last night as this game was happening because I was absolutely baffled by what was happening. I even tweeted that I hoped this article was coming. In a long list of absolutely horrific CB Bucknor umpiring jobs, this one might be tops. This was the most horribly umpired game I’ve ever seen. It started way earlier than Werth’s AB too.
Bryce Harper’s very first at-bat set this all in motion. He was rung up on a straight fastball that was over 6 inches inside. That by itself is bad, but when you go back and look at the actual pitch, you can see what’s worse… CB Bucknor was standing completely behind the left handed batters box. He couldn’t possibly see the pitch as it was being delivered, he even had to move his head mid-pitch to see it. His head was aligned with the left handed batters box chalk, the ball crossed the chalk, and thus it was a strike.
He missed a ton more ball-strike calls in that game, the ones to Werth being terrible but a few against Scherzer were equally baffling. This was almost entirely one sided incompetence in this game and to the Nationals credit they still managed to win.
Even after that foul tip call, Bucknor made a foul ball signal, then an out signal, then walked off like the game was over only to un-end the game after the Nationals already went through the high five line.
It isn’t only that Bucknor is incompetent, because he very obviously is, but it is *how* he is incompetent that is truly baffling. If he just didn’t know the zone or had his own wild interpretation of it, fine, but he doesn’t even put himself in position to see the pitch. He’s just lazy, which is the worst type of incompetence. Jayson Werth screaming Bucknor off the field immediately skyrocketed him up my list of favorite people in baseball.
I don’t know how to embed a gif or image but here is the imgur link for the missed strike to Harper and the reactions to the foul tip mistake: http://imgur.com/a/Xbc7h
The Eric Gregg performance in Game 7 of the 1997 World Series retired the Worst Ball and Strike Award for perpetuity.
Eric Gregg wasn’t even on the umpiring crew for the 1997 World Series. The Eric Gregg Experience game was NLCS game 5.
Anyone know if there any way to look up historical strike zone accuracy by umpire (without checking each game individually)?
There used to be a chart at baseballsavant, but is has been removed.
CBB got overruled by the rest of the crew tonight on a play where he was closest and had the best view. Can we expect another article tomorrow?
For those curious http://thecomeback.com/mlb/cb-bucknor-blows-another-call.html
Not snarking, I really wonder if he has something going on like a vision issue or minor stroke.
Curious if there is a way to find out:
What effect does pitch framing have on Bucknor, compared to other umpires?
success rates of the best framers, any notable differences in success rates of the worst…?
Reading through the comments what I find sad is how many umpires we can name.
In related news, water is wet.
It’s the grin on his face when Werth is shouting at him that pisses me off the most. Can you imagine caring so little what anyone thinks of how you do your job?
Umps get yelled at a lot. They need a method of distancing themselves from the huge guy in front of them yelling. Smiling is healthy there, prevents him from getting wrapped up in it.
He probably wouldn’t get yelled at so often if he wasn’t so awful at his job that he would have been fired a dozen times over except that just can’t happen.
It is so silly that bad umpiring is allowed to continue. Too many “bad days” as a player and you lose your job, plain and simple. Umpires should be evaluated all season long, and the ones who consistently perform the worst, should lose their jobs. This will likely never happen, hopefully this will serve to hasten the onset of robo umps.
RoboUmp for balls & strikes can’t happen soon enough… so sick of watching these umps w/ their terrible judgement & inconsistency. HP umps (balls/strikes) are getting worse each year, i swear…
so i’ve seen a lot of bucknor’s “highlights” before, and i know him to be a pretty terrible ump overall. but has anyone else watched the .gifs embedded here (or others from the game) and thought “goddamn, that’s just an excellent framing job”. cuz i feel that way. bucknor sucks, those pitches are all balls, but on every single one of them it looks like the catcher (i have no idea who the catcher is–it’s the braves) just preternaturally snaps it right to the corner for what looks like a strike. granted, a good ump with a good angle on the ball should be able to see that it’s 6″ off the plate, but man, those pitches sure look like they are framed really well.