Are Major League Umpires Racist?

For millennia, our ancestors competed for the scarce resources of Africa and Eurasia.

I swear I'll get to baseball umpires in a moment.
 
When one tribe confronted another, it was a life or death situation. There was a limited supply of food. A fight meant potential death by bludgeoning; cooperation meant potential death by starvation. 

Viewing strangers with a critical eye was key to survival.
 
Thus, it’s easy to understand how xenophobia could have had an evolutionary origin.

We modern humans, unfortunately, are victims of our own history. The prejudices that helped us survive the Stone Age are confusing—or worse—in the Silicon Age.
 
For the record, I’m not condoning racism here. If you believe your race is superior to others, you are morally and factually wrong. Please don’t read further.

That said, I don't think there are many “conscious” racists out there anymore. The problem is that what people call “discrimination” happens in the subconscious. Slight changes in behavior—barely measurable and without willful origin—constitute a majority of the findings of “racism” in academic studies.

And the media eats it up.

Take the recent Wolfers-Price study, in which NBA referees were portrayed as racist and discriminatory. When the story broke, the NBA had a PR nightmare on its hands. The league even commissioned its own study in an attempt to refute the original.

Might some NBA referees be racist? Maybe—I don’t know any of them personally, and I can’t peer into the dark reaches of their brain to find out.

However, why would any racist try to get a job in the NBA, where 80 percent of the players are Black? Wouldn’t daily interactions with members of another race drive racists to their underground bunkers?

With the debate raging in the NBA, the press is now pushing another study about race and officiating—this time in baseball. In it, a crew of economics researchers at the University of Texas examined data from three big league seasons—and declared the existence of widespread discrimination among MLB umpires.
 
After picking through their results, though, I was a little disappointed. 

When a pitcher and an umpire are of the same race, the average umpire calls strikes about 32 percent of the time. When the umpire and pitcher differ in ethnicity, 31 percent of pitches are called strikes.
 
This is a simplification of the study's findings, but it should be enough for this discussion.
 
Because the researchers looked at several years' worth of data—two million total pitches and 360,000 called strikes—they were able to turn a one percent discrepancy into something "statistically significant."

When you look for discrimination, as the saying goes, you’ll find discrimination.
 
I have a lot of problems with how the study was conducted, chief among them the fact that the researchers didn’t attempt to control for the quality of the hitter or the pitcher.

All-Star caliber players generally get a better strike zone than rookies, and Cy Young winners usually have calls break their way. I've also noticed umpires expand their strike zones in long games and blow outs. 

These are potential confounds which could discredit the findings.
 
Also, despite the fact that the researchers seemed confident in their sample size, I'd point out that there were only five Black umpires and 27 Black pitchers included in the study. 

That’s just not a lot of subjects.
 
If one or two of those pitchers classified as "Black" by the researchers had control problems, the results could have been compromised. You need a larger test group to ensure that any individual differences average out.
 
I'm sure there are other problems with this study—but I'm not here to refute the possibility of racist umpiring. In fact, it could very well be the case that evolutionary unconscious bias is rearing its head in the form of subjective strike calls.

Does this mean baseball umpires are a bunch of KKK members or Black Panthers?

No—but I'd still hope that Major League Baseball would take the publication of the Texas study as an opportunity to improve the quality of officiating around the bigs.

Umpires should be held to the highest standard. Changes in the strike zone—racist or otherwise—are unacceptable.
 
For a long time, strike zones seemed to shift on umpires' whims. Now, though, video analysis and some reforms pushed by Bud Selig have improved consistency.

Let's kick it up a notch.
 
Umpires should reject the accusations of racism while taking it upon themselves to get better. Perfection is impossible, but they could at least get their calls closer to the ideal.
 
In the process, they could begin to conquer that xenophobic Stone Age bastard inside each of us.