Grading MLB umpires through 3 World Series games: Blue Jays have a bone to pick

MLB umpires can take over a game more than fans, managers or players would like. They have a hard job, but one missed call can swing a given game, series or season. We've even seen that during these playoffs. Things went rather smoothly on the umpire front for the most part in the first two games, but the same cannot be said about World Series Game 3.

Bo Bichette led off the second inning with a single, giving the Toronto Blue Jays a chance to jump out to an early lead against the Los Angeles Dodgers, but what sure looked like a budding rally wound up being anything but. Daulton Varsho took what looked like ball four, but was called a strike by home plate umpire Mark Wegner in delayed fashion. The issue with this is that neither Varsho nor Bichette heard him. This caused Varsho to begin to walk to first base and Bichette to get off the first base bag. Bichette wound up getting picked off after the miscue.

Sure, Bichette (and Varsho) shouldn't have assumed anything, but there's no excuse for what Wegner did. This was obviously a late call, and one that could end up costing Toronto the game.

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Mark Wegner screwed the Blue Jays twice with one call

The timing of the strike call threw everyone off. This is the World Series - there simply has to be a sense of urgency to call pitches quickly, particularly in a three-ball count. Had Wegner been quicker, I'm confident Bichette wouldn't have been picked off.

What's even worse, though, is that the pitch wasn't even a strike. It's one thing to take an unusual amount of time but still get the call right. It's another to get it wrong. Varsho should've walked. The Blue Jays should've had two men on and nobody out.

Making a mistake is one thing, but how exactly was pitch No. 4 (rightly) called a ball, and pitch No. 5, which was a bit higher, called a strike? There's just no excuse for that. ABS will fix this issue next year, but the Jays needed something to go their way right now.

There's no telling what was going to happen after the fact, but the next batter, Alejandro Kirk, did line a base hit. Had that played out the same, the Jays could've easily taken the early lead - although with Bichette's speed severely compromised due to the knee injury he's playing through, that's far from a guarantee.

The cherry on top is that the second batter of the second inning, Teoscar Hernandez, a former Blue Jay, launched a solo home run to give the Dodgers a lead. Instead of what likely would've been a tie game, the Jays found themselves trailing.

They still had many innings to rebound from this Wegner miscue, so the Jays can't blame a loss solely on him, but again, this is the kind of call (or in this case delayed call) that can change an at-bat, a game, or a series. One fortunate thing, though, is that the umpiring performance thus far has been relatively inconsequential, which is exactly what fans want.

This is the first time umpires have severely botched a call in this year's World Series

A look at the umpire scorecards for Games 1 and 2 shows that things didn't go too poorly. Adrian Johnson didn't fare too well in Game 2, but I wouldn't say any of his missed calls were so inconsequential. Will Little appeared to have been above-average in Game 1.

Another topic to note is that most of the missed calls appear to have favored the Blue Jays, so it's not as if there's some grand conspiracy with this umpiring crew favoring the Dodgers. Still, whenever there's a mishap of this magnitude, fans are going to get upset.

Game 3 ump show highlights incomprehensible MLB decision

With this being the World Series, fans have reason to believe that MLB chose its best umpires to call these games. That couldn't have been further from the truth.

Only one umpire appearing in this World Series, Alan Porter, is ranked within the top 10 per Umpire Auditor. Only two umpires are ranked within the top 29. There are two umpires in this series who are ranked within the bottom 30.

Wegner is ranked 38th out of 92 umpires - not awful, but not good enough for a World Series. What makes that fact even crazier is that he's the crew chief of this umpiring crew, and he's umpired a pair of Fall Classics. Humans are bound to make mistakes, even ones as bad as the strike call against Varsho, but there's no excuse for the delay.

Including him, and many others on this crew, instead of the actual best umpires, is a shame for what's shaping up to be an outstanding series. The last thing anyone wants is for an umpire mistake to determine any major outcome in a series, a World Series especially. Thus far, we'd give these umpires a respectable C+, but it's about time they clean up their act.

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