I love heat maps? From Jeff Zimmerman's report on the six World Series umpires, here is Game 1 plate ump John Hirschbeck's strike zone this season, left-handed hitters only:

Hirschbeck seems overly generous with pitches low and outside. Of course, those are the ones Hirschbeck can't see too well. Maybe someone at MLB -- or with the umpires' union -- could point this out and threaten Hirshbeck's job security if he doesn't address this small (but measurable) deficiency. Nah. Why do something like that?

I kid the umpires because I love them. Also, there's this. Zimmerman: "At least none of these umpires are at the extreme ends of the strike zone spectrum. Compared to the previous playoff series’s this off season, this crew’s strike zone should be one of the more consistent ones."

I'm going to assume this isn't accidental. While Major League Baseball is hamstrung to some degree by their contractual relationship with the umpires, they do have some room for judgment when selecting postseason umpires. And MLB has access to the same PITCHf/x data -- more, actually -- as the rest of us. I think it would be naive to think nobody at MLB is looking at these same heat maps (or something that tells essentially the same stories).

Look at more of the heat maps. It's actually pretty amazing how many pitches even the good umpires miss. And while I know some arbiters are privately fond of their strike zones -- as opposed to, you know, baseball's strike zone -- I also don't believe they mean to have strike zones so oddly shaped.

Granted, some of that oddness is about sample size and measurement error. But it's also a hard job, seeing those blurs coming in at 95 miles an hour or bending like a rainbow. Generally speaking, the umpires do a pretty good job and most of them probably do the job nearly as well as it can be done.