It is time for Major League Baseball umpires to stop calling balls and strikes

Having umpires call balls and strikes is one of the most fundamental aspects of both the game of baseball and the profession of Major League Baseball umpires. But as we get better at recognizing what is really a strike it is becoming painfully obvious that it is time for the umps to give up the responsibility.

Noah Davis and Michael Lopez at Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, recently wrote a column called "Umpires Are Less Blind Than They Used To Be." Thanks to tracking technology called PITCHf/x, which was installed in every stadium in 2008, umpires have gotten better at deciding what is a ball and what is a strike.

However, as the title implies, while the umps are better they are still not very good.

The data revealed to Davis and Lopez that the average umpire had an accuracy rate of slightly more than 83% in 2008 when calling balls in strikes. That accuracy quickly improved and is now at 86% now that umpires can more accurately see which pitches they are getting right and more importantly, the pitches they get wrong.

But while the umpires have gotten better, the data also reveals two glaring problems once you look past the general improvement.

1. Umpires are still getting a lot of pitches wrong.

While 86% is better than 83%, that still means the average umpire is wrong on 14% of the pitches and even the best umpire is still missing more than 10% of the calls. Over the course of an entire game that is a LOT of missed calls.

According to Fangraphs, the average MLB game this season has 288 pitches. Of those pitches, batters swing 46.7% of the time meaning umpires are responsible for calling ball or strike approximately 154 times a game.

Considering 14% of balls and strikes calls are wrong, umpires are wrong 21-22 times per game on average. That's not good. Over the course of a full season, umpires are wrong more than 50,000 times. That's even worse.

Now consider that not all pitches are borderline balls and strikes. That means their error rate on close pitches is probably a lot higher than 14%.

No wonder players are always so angry.

2. Umpires may not be able to get any better without more help.

The umpires have improved. So that means they can continue to improve and maybe someday they will reach a more acceptable level, say 95% accuracy, right? Maybe not.

While PITCHf/x data shows that the umpires have improved since 2008, that improvement appears to have peaked and leveled off. The accuracy level for the last three years has hovered around 86% and even dipped a little bit from 2013 to 2014.

This suggests that, even with the PITCHf/x assistance, under current conditions, umpires will continue to miss 14% of their balls and strikes calls until they get even more help.

Technology already exists to assist umpires but so far MLB has shunned it.

One of the biggest driving forces for the addition of instant replay to MLB in the last few years was that technology had gotten to the point where fans could easily see all the calls umpires were missing.

Sports have a huge problem when fans can more accurately make a call at home than an official can make at the game. It should never happen and yet, that's where we are with balls and strikes.

As we can see every Sunday on ESPN with their "K-Zone," technology exists that can instantaneously show whether a pitch was in the strike zone or not.

"But that is just a 2-dimensional plane and the strike zone is 3-dimensional as it covers the entire plate, not just the front edge."

This is a valid concern. But at the same time, it probably still has an accuracy rate much closer to 95% than the umpires. But if not, ESPN has also introduced a 3-dimensional K-Zone.

This version of the K-Zone is not instantaneous but it can be generated within a few seconds. In theory, Major League Baseball could easily use the 2-dimensional zone for all pitches and then use the 3-dimensional view if a player wanted to challenge the initial call.

Umpires calling balls and strikes is a part of baseball. But until recently we didn't know just how bad they are at it. Despite recent improvement, umpires are still getting it wrong more than 50,000 times each season. That is too much, it is not going to get better, and there is a way to get the calls right.

The time is now to make the change.