Laz Díaz And Modern Baseball Are Mutually Through With One Another

Laz Díaz has had enough of baseball. The veteran umpire will wrap up a three-decade career this week, will hang up the mask and the chest protector, and will bid good riddance to the sport. Major League Baseball offered buyouts to umpires earlier this season, and seven veterans, including Díaz and the dreaded C.B. Bucknor, raised their hands. Bucknor is already missing from the sport, having absorbed a deflected Jacob Misiorowski heater with his face mask back in May, and has not returned since. Díaz, meanwhile, has had the summer to make a farewell tour and reflect on his time in the game. His conclusion, per an interview with Bob Nightengale of USA Today: Baseball stinks now. Díaz will not miss it. "There’s just so much scrutiny and negative stuff now," Díaz said. "There are a lot of people I’m going to miss, and I made a lot of friends, but what I won’t miss is the game. Not one bit. It’s just changed so much. There’s so much more technical stuff. It’s kind of restricted us. I mean, everything is black and white now. You can’t manage the game." The not-fond farewell will largely be mutual, at least among the baseball-watching public. In any given era, casual fans might know the names and faces of just a handful of umpires, and never for any happy reason. Díaz is a known guy, and not only because he was the subject of the most theatrical of Aaron Boone's many, many meltdowns. He is not especially pugnacious or hot-headed, but his strike zone is subject to mood and influence. The adoption, in television broadcasts, of K-Zone technology has allowed the tracking and posting of umpire performance for decades now. Whether those efforts are reliable, they are influential, and for years they have said that Díaz has his own interpretive strike zone, which tends to be elastic and pitcher-friendly. The website Ump Scorecards says that Díaz is maybe not a Bucknor-level disaster back there, but that he tends to miss a lot: This season, for instance, Ump Scorecards says Díaz is worst in baseball in the cumulative Correct Calls Above Exp., which they describe as the difference "between actual correct calls and expected correct calls."

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