Silver Boot series finale's ump was as bad as Rangers fans thought

It’s not unusual for most baseball fans to find fault with the job an umpire is doing. Even if they’re getting the call right almost all of the time. However, occasionally, the managers, fans, and players are entirely justified in getting quite angry with the ump. Such was the case in the Texas Rangers’ Silver Boot series finale against the Houston Astros.

Baseball is one of those sports that has metrics for everything. That includes the job the umpires are doing. And on Sunday, the home plate umpire, Nick Mahrley, was especially bad at his job.

Brutal ump show in Rangers-Astros finale leaves both teams fuming

Mahrley was so bad that two teams with quite a bit of bad blood, the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros, agreed on one thing. He needed to do better. It got so bad that Astros skipper Joe Espada was booted from the game early on for arguing balls and strikes calls.

Throughout the game, the camera often caught one Rangers or Astros player after another griping and grimacing over one of Mahrley’s decisions. Espada getting tossed might have been the only thing that kept Bruce Bochy in the game. He stepped down the volume of his complaining after Espada got run, but he certainly wasn’t pleased.

According to UmpScorecards, Mahrley didn’t get a good grade. In fact, he was the 6th least accurate umpire calling a game on Sunday. That put him squarely in the bottom half of the 15 home plate umps working.

The social media account Umpire Auditor was even less forgiving, calling him the least accurate umpire on Sunday. His struggles highlighted what was not a great weekend for officiating overall. 

This isn’t about blaming the ump for the Texas Rangers’ loss. The calls were plenty bad against Houston as well as for it. It’s about a continued need for Major League Baseball to understand that the situation is far more dire than Rob Manfred’s office seems to let on.