On July 4 in Pittsburgh, home-plate umpire Joe West found himself in the middle of a managerial tiff. In the top of the fourth inning, Pirates pitcher Jordan Lyles followed Pittsburgh’s purpose-pitch playbook and repeatedly threw high and tight to the Cubs’ Javier Báez. Chicago manager Joe Maddon, attempting to protect his player and, perhaps, demonstrate some intensity to his dissatisfied boss, Theo Epstein, started yelling from the dugout, either at West or at his counterpart on the Pirates’ side, Clint Hurdle. The long-tenured West, who’s infamous for his short fuse, ejected the Cubs skipper from the game, prompting Maddon to emerge from the dugout and home in on Hurdle.
West, who’s not known for deescalating tense situations, seemed to do a decent job of defusing this one. After the ejection, he body-blocked Maddon, unfazed by the manager’s slow-motion spin move. In the fifth, Pirates reliever Clay Holmes beaned the Cubs’ David Bote with the bases loaded; West warned both benches, but knowing that the run-plating plunking was unlikely to be intentional, he didn’t toss Holmes. After that, the tensions subsided.
Lost amid the drama of Maddon’s crusade and West’s swift response was a possible first in West’s 40-plus-year career: Behind home plate, he umped a perfect game. When the Cubs were pitching, West made every ball and strike call correctly, if we define “correctly” as “in accordance with the rule book zone.” Given that hitters aren’t all the same size and that strike zones have different dimensions, with variable top and bottom boundaries, it’s difficult to capture umpire perfection in one pitch plot, but the graph of West’s calls on Cubs pitches still shows that he had a good day.
Since the start of 2008, the first full season when pitch-tracking systems were installed in every stadium, MLB players have recorded 51 cycles, 48 triple plays, and 38 no-hitters (not counting combined no-hitters). All those infrequent events have occurred more often than the umpire perfect game. Over the same span, home-plate umpires have made every pitch call correctly on one team only 24 times in games that lasted at least nine innings, with West’s the most recent. That’s roughly once per 1,200 games, or a little more than twice per season, on average. It’s not quite as uncommon as the pitcher perfect game—we’ve seen only six of those since ’08—but it’s rarer than most of the events considered deserving of push notifications.
[Read Ben Lindbergh's piece about the obstacles that make it nearly impossible for umpires to call every pitch right for one team.]
