Behind the plate, all the right calls all game long

According to Umpire Scorecards, a website that uses MLB data from Baseball Savant to track umpires’ accuracy, Mark Ripperger ranked third in accuracy at 95.93% among the 75 umpires who had worked the plate at least three times through last Wednesday. (X via Wendelstedt Umpire School)

By Tyler Kepner / The Athletic

Mark Ripperger had played two years of high school baseball in Escondido, California, when he decided, as most 16-year-olds do, that he’d like to make some money. His parents and friends suggested he find a job in a field he loved, and the field he loved was baseball.

He thought about umpiring Little League games, but instead, he hooked up with a high school umpires association, taking assignments far from home to avoid conflicts of interest. After graduating, when Ripperger was allowed to work games at his alma mater, Escondido High School, objectivity came naturally.

“I’ll tell you, that kind of comes out of you immediately,” he said, “especially if you go into this and you want to do well.”

On April 10 in Kansas City, Missouri, Ripperger did the job as well as it can possibly be done: He worked a perfect game behind the plate. The Umpire Scorecards website, which uses MLB data from Baseball Savant to track umpires’ accuracy, reported that the Kansas City Royals and Minnesota Twins took 136 pitches that day, and Ripperger called all of them correctly.

Ripperger, a full-time umpire since 2015, did not realize at the time that he had done a flawless job.

“There are times when I walk off the field and I don’t feel like I was very good that day, and I ended up being very good,” he said. “And there are days when I walk off thinking that I just nailed it, and I wasn’t as good as I thought. So, no, not during that Thursday did I feel that way. I was certainly not expecting this sort of outcome when I walked off the field. I felt very good about my performance, very good about my game. But I certainly didn’t think it was that.”

The perfect game is an unofficial feat — Umpire Scorecards is not affiliated with MLB — but Ripperger’s game stands as just the second in the 11 years of Statcast data. The other was by Pat Hoberg in Game 2 of the 2022 World Series in Houston.

Hoberg, who has since been fired for violating MLB’s gambling rules, declined an interview request during that World Series. Ripperger, too, was initially reluctant to talk about his achievement. Umpires almost always prefer to stay in the background.

But they are also proud of their profession and aware of the criticism that comes with it. The perfect game was a chance to commemorate a job well done.

“I kind of like to just fly under the radar — do my job the best I can and not really be in the spotlight,” Ripperger said. “That’s for the players. I know that our successes are not celebrated very much, whatever they are, and our blunders make us look not in a great light, I guess. I’m flattered about all this stuff, but at the same time, I’m just one of 76, and all those guys have great games as well.”

Even so, Umpire Scorecards ranks Ripperger among the best. Of the 75 umpires who had worked the plate at least three times through last Wednesday, he ranked third in accuracy at 95.93%, trailing only Derek Thomas (97.24%) and Will Little (95.96%).

Ripperger, 44, felt an instant, indefinable connection with umpiring. His first instructor — while he was still in high school — was Mike Winters, a major league umpire from 1988 to 2019, and he bonded with amateur umpires who took the job seriously.

“We had weekly meetings, and after the meetings I would go to a restaurant and hang out with them,” Ripperger said. “They’d go have a drink, and I’d sit there with them at the restaurant and drink my water — or Pepsi or Coke or whatever — and listen to their stories. And I just fell in love with the job.”

It’s a steep climb to the few MLB jobs available, and Ripperger, who started professionally in 2003, worked for years in the Arizona Rookie League, the Northwest League, the Midwest League, the California League, the Eastern League, the Hawaii Winter League, the Venezuelan Winter League and the Pacific Coast League.

He made his MLB debut in 2010, five years before his full-time promotion. His fraternity strives for perfection while understanding it will (almost) always elude them.

“We are trying to get everything right, and sometimes we don’t — but it’s not for lack of effort,” Ripperger said. “We have an incredibly hard job, and we know it’s thankless, we really do. We know many people don’t care for us.

“But the one thing I hear a lot is that we aren’t held accountable. That kind of bothers me sometimes, because we are held accountable, mostly by ourselves. We hold ourselves accountable for the job that we do, but then we also have supervisors and Major League Baseball that tell us how we can be better and help us, and they hold us accountable as well. We are very dedicated to this job, and we love it, and we do our best to get everything right, knowing that we always won’t.”

Baseball tested the automated ball-strike challenge system in spring training and could implement it in official games next season. That possibility, Ripperger said, does not affect the way he calls a game. The notion that umpires tailor their strike zones to personal preferences, he added, is a myth.

“I don’t see that from anybody, and I don’t believe anyone has that mindset,” he said. “I believe everyone is trying to get everything right that they possibly can with the zone that’s written in the rule book.”

Umpires are graded each game for accuracy on ball-strike calls, safe-out calls, and so on. MLB considers those grades for postseason assignments, while also seeking a balance of veteran and less-experienced umpires for each crew. That way, younger umpires can be ready for future leadership roles.

As nice as it is to get a laudatory social media post from an independent grader, it’s not what an umpire dreams about. Ripperger worked his first World Series last fall and had the plate for the final game of the season at Yankee Stadium.

“I relished that opportunity and wanted that opportunity since I started this — kind of like the player that wants to hit the home run like Freddie Freeman did in Game 1, the grand slam to win the game,” he said. “This was what I envisioned, working the World Series — albeit Game 7 instead of Game 5, but it was still the clinching game, just doing it — and I did it. It was unbelievable, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”