Jen Pawol became the first woman to umpire an MLB game and call balls and strikes behind home plate.
Pawol’s ball and strike accuracy was 93%, comparable to many full-time MLB umpires.
Yes, Jen Pawol made history by becoming the first woman to umpire a Major League Baseball game and, on Sunday, Aug. 10, she was the first to call balls and strikes behind home plate.
In any era, that would be significant. Yet in this modern landscape of Statcast strike zones and umpire ratings, and the scrutiny of thousands of social media naysayers, every pitch Pawol called would be parsed and graded in a manner that simply didn’t exist a decade or two ago.
And just how did Pawol do in arbitrating the Atlanta Braves-Miami Marlins clash Sunday in Atlanta?
Pretty darn well.
Pawol called 93% of balls and strikes correctly, according to Umpire Scorecards, which places her in the bottom third of umpire performance this season, but very much in line with her peers.
Pawol, 48, brought more than 1,200 games of minor league experience to her fill-in assignment, necessitated because the Marlins and Braves played a weekend doubleheader, disrupting the usual umpire rotation.
She called 140 of 151 balls and strikes correctly, according to Umpire Scorecards, which simulates every pitch 500 times and, using a dizzying array of factors, aims to create what it calls ‘interpretability, validity, practicality, and fairness.’
Pawol’s 92.72% hit rate puts her nose-to-nose with a bevy of full-time MLB umpires, including veterans Laz Diaz (92.64%) and CB Bucknor (92.85), who tend to draw the ire of fans, along with the more anonymous Bruce Dreckman (92.76) and Carlos Torres (93.13%).
The median percentage for all umpires this season is 94%, or, Pawol’s percentage had two more calls been determined correct. Edwin Jimenez, also a Class AAA fill-in umpire in his third year calling balls and strikes in the majors, leads all umpires with 96.48% accuracy in 19 plate assignments.
In fact, the 16 Triple-A fill-ins have acquitted themselves quite well, producing a 94.46 median in 10 games. Pawol? She’s umped one game, a sample size statistically insignificant as far as assessing her performance.
Yet in the most important metric – did the home plate umpire impact the game? – Pawol did just fine, ‘favoring’ the Marlins by 0.28 runs, per Umpire Scorecards. The Braves won the game 7-1.
You might say, then, that Pawol earned the greatest compliment an ump could receive: Other than her trailblazing distinction, you’d have hardly noticed her.
‘We certainly didn’t call her up from A-ball, right?’ said Marlins starter Cal Quantrill, per MLB.com. ‘I’m sure she was well-prepared, and I think part of the game moving forward is if this is normal, then we’re gonna treat it normal, too. I thought it was fine, and I think she did a quality job.
‘She should be very proud of herself, and it’s kind of a cool little thing to be a part of it. But yeah, just another day.’
One that figures to be repeated.