Win a Free Copy of THT 2016!

Have you heard? The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2016 is now available for sale. You can check out the table of contents and read some excerpts from the book. When you finish that you can purchase it from our independent publishing platform, Createspace, in print form, or from Amazon in print form, and also digitally on Amazon for the Kindle.

But wait, there’s more! Because we’re giving folk, and since it’s the beginning of the holiday season and all, we want to give you a chance to win yourself a free copy of the book. So today and tomorrow (and yesterday), we’ll be running a trivia contest based on one of the articles in the book. The first person to post the correct answer in the comments will win a free physical copy of the book (sorry, no free Kindle version). It’s just that simple!

Today’s question comes to you from Peter Bonney’s article, “Who Watches the Watchers? Introducing Umpire Consistency Score,” where he, you know, introduces an umpire consistency score. You’ll have to read the article for the nuts and bolts of the metric, but it sets out to do just what it says. Bonney utilizes both raw UCS as well as UCS150, which is UCS (re-normalized) per 150 pitches (i.e. UCS per typical game). Toward the end of the piece, he busts out his whole leaderboard of umpires who worked from 2008-2015 and called at least 10,000 pitches. So the question before you today, dear reader, is this:

Can you name two of the top 10 umpires, as ranked by UCS150?

Note: If you name more than two umpires, your entry will be automatically discarded.

Good luck!