It’s pretty clear the Yankees aren’t the only ones who thought home plate umpire Brian Walsh had a rough night behind the plate in their loss to Houston on Wednesday night.
The ump, who tossed Devin Williams and Aaron Boone in the bottom of the eighth for complaining about several missed calls, was also graded poorly by the website umpscorecards.com.
Perhaps most notably, the site said his calls favored the Astros by 1.4 runs.
According to the site, that stat “represents the impact of an umpire on a team’s or game’s expected runs.”
Since it’s an inexact science, you can at least compare how other umpires were rated and how Walsh was graded in his other games as a home plate umpire.
For instance, the next largest amount a team was judged to have been favored by on Wednesday was Baltimore getting 0.68 runs over San Diego.
Additionally, the 1.4 runs in Wednesday’s game was the largest margin in a Walsh-called game this season, edging out the 1.38 runs the A’s got over the Twins in a 14-3 win on June 5.
But following those two, Walsh doesn’t have a game judged to have had more than a 1.01 run favor.
And Wednesday’s game wasn’t Walsh’s first in the spotlight this year for unwanted reasons.
On July 28, Baltimore’s Zach Elfin threw a pitch down the heart of the plate to Toronto’s Ernie Clement and it was called a ball, which outraged Baltimore broadcasters Kevin Brown and Ben McDonald.
“That’s literally right down the middle,” Brown said.
And McDonald added, “I mean, you couldn’t set it on a tee in the heart of the plate any better than that. How do you miss that?”
No doubt, Boone and Williams would agree.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
