But although this year’s playoffs have contained a couple of poorly called games, it’s not quite time to kill the umpires yet. Their overall strike-zone accuracy this postseason has not been significantly lower than what it was in the regular season, nor has it been much worse than you’d expect if you picked a handful of MLB games at random.

. . . Because MLB bases its postseason crew assignments on merit, we might expect the playoff umpires to have a better accuracy rate than the overall regular-season average. But as my Grantland colleague Ben Lindbergh noted last year, since 2009 there’s been essentially no difference in strike-zone accuracy between regular-season and postseason games.⁴ So although it would be nice if the strike zone were being called more precisely in the playoffs, the umpires’ execution so far is almost exactly what we’d expect based on their performance during the regular season.

Read the article “Playoff Homeplate Umps Miss 10% of Their Calls” on fivethirtyeight.com.