Worst/Best Ever? Introducing Vince's Plate Performers

Ever wonder if you team's home plate umpire was indeed the worst ever? With Vince's Plate Performers, discover the best and worst pitch-calling performances of the day.*

Oddly enough, Will Little
leads the league in # of
times with a "Best" plate.

UEFL contributor Vince uses Brooks Baseball and the strike zone plots' compiled pitch f/x data to select a best and worst performance of the night. Vince's selections are presented in a table that includes day-by-day entries, with a leaderboard to capture the season's most-often "best" and "worst" entries.

With "worst _ ever" appearing so often in the modern fan's vernacular, we once again turn to analytics in an attempt to apply a measure of accuracy to such impassioned claims.

Though umpire scapegoating isn't going anywhere, the first step toward combating these distortions is to produce evidence that the "worst ever" statement isn't so much as correct for the day, much less "ever."

Furthermore, every so often, that "worst ever" umpire actually will show up as the best of the day instead, giving credence to Walt Whitman's quip, "I am as bad as the worst, but thank God, I am as good as the best."

Click here for Vince's Plate Performers, or visit the Analysis menu to access the tables.

*For entertainment purposes only. The purpose of Vince's Plate Performers is to track daily umpire performance to show that, no, your team's plate umpire for any given day is not the worst in baseball.