Get Your Head in the Game, Ump!

A major league baseball game evokes a feeling like no other sporting event, with its rich history, timeless ballpark traditions like the seventh inning stretch, and the sound of the ball cracking off the bat as it leaves the park for a towering left-field home run. Fans are dialed into their team’s play, as well as the performance of the home plate umpire, whose calling of balls and strikes can heavily influence the outcome of the game. Now, a new first-of-its-kind University of Maryland study dives deeper into umpire performance by examining the dynamic ways in which they allocate their attention as the game unfolds, with findings that may help improve general job productivity and decision-making under stress in settings beyond baseball. 

Published by The Economic Journal, the study finds that umpire attention is a depletable resource. Umpires clearly devote attention to pivotal decisions. When decisions are very important to the outcome of a game, the accuracy of an umpire’s call improves, demonstrating they pay more attention to these high-stakes decisions. If they have faced high-stakes decisions early in the game, their performance for future scenarios drops as though they have depleted their tank of attention. The study also found that umpires conserve attention early in the game in anticipation of having to make high-stakes decisions later in the inning.

Jim Archsmith, an assistant professor in UMD’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and lead author of the study produced the first real evidence that people allocate their attention in this dynamic way. 

Archsmith and his team also discovered that short breaks are important as a tool for replenishing attention. He refers to the 20/20/20 rule, which suggests taking a 20-second break every 20 minutes by focusing vision on something 20 feet away. It is intended to prevent screen fatigue. He indicates that they are finding similar patterns of success with the breaks umpires take between innings during TV timeouts. 

The team compiled data on more than 3 million decisions made by 127 home-plate umpires in 26,356 Major League Baseball (MLB) games between 2008 and 2018. They observed the umpire’s ball/strike decisions as well as the correct call obtained from a high-precision pitch-tracking technology called TrackMan, which is a system familiar to TV viewers as it shows real-time on-screen pitch location. 

“This technology is accurate to within about one inch, so we know the true path of the baseball as it’s crossing home plate,” explains Archsmith. “We know every umpire’s decision and the boundaries of the strikes, so that’s how we calculate the primary outcome of interest, which is whether or not the umpire is getting a call right in a particular situation. We also include certain controls to account for the fact that some umpires have different and idiosyncratic strike zones.”

Umpires are much more accurate when the situation is leveraged, a baseball term that refers to how much influence a situation has on the outcome of the game. Umpires want to be correct more often late in the game, particularly in a scenario where they must break a tie because it has a much larger impact on the game’s eventual winner.

“No one really hassles an umpire for incorrect calls when it’s two balls, one strike count but people care a lot when it’s full count and the bases are loaded and they get the call wrong,” Archsmith said. “Those are the situations that generate media attention, and I think there is an aversion towards being in the spotlight for umpires and getting those important calls correct is really built into their utility function. We see it in the data, calls are much more accurate when the calls are high stakes vs. low stakes.” 

Archsmith emphasizes that this is not just a paper about baseball, and not really about professional athletes but professional decision-makers. He believes it is possible that these qualitative results could apply to everyday jobs that involve repeated decision-making under stress.

“We really care about people’s productivity at work,” Archsmith said. “Paying attention is really important and oftentimes people are getting mentally tired out. Past effort does deplete your ability to make good decisions in the moment, but also, anticipation of future effort reduces your ability to make good decisions because you’re saving that effort for later.”

He concedes that examining whether similar dynamics of attention are seen in different professional settings are an important next step to understanding if baseball truly is analogous to real life…at least when it comes to making the hard calls.