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But even if Eddings is coming up middle of the pack in UmpERA...there is a lot of room for that to be luck/random distribution of pitchers called...From 2002 (the year he cracked the rotation of MLB umps for good) to 2008, Eddings had an umpire factor of 90. That's a bigger influence on scoring than any ballpark in the bigs on the pitching side. He could be improving...his yearly ump factors ran: 91, 84, 88, 101, 86, 90, 92...not seeing a trend through 2008. But you never know. I tend to trust my multivariable matrix solver over the linear reports that BP offers for first-glance stuff. Though I will grant you that Brooks has the strikezone broken down and Eddings didn't look nearly as bad as I remember him looking in 2007.