10 Worst Umpires in Major League Baseball

The 2024 MLB season has officially kicked off and before things get going, we've decided to rank the league's umpires again. Over the past few years, it seems umpiring has gotten worse and worse, leading to a chorus of calls for robot umps to take over. In 2023, MLB implemented new rules intended to speed up games. That only led to more confusion and a some ugly incidents.

Umpires are mostly judged by how they do behind the plate, since that's where they make the most impact. Thankfully, these days it's not too hard to judge them thanks to sites like Umpire Scorecards who rate their performance.

There are a number of metrics to judge umpires by. The first is accuracy, which is the percentage of pitches called correctly. Another is CCAx, or correct calls above expected, which is the difference between correct calls and expected correct calls. Consistency is the percentage of correct calls inconsistent with the established umpire zone. AAx, or accuracy above expected, is the difference between actual accuracy and expected accuracy.

With that in mind, we're here to rank the 10 worst umpires employed by Major League Baseball. For reference, here are our lists from 2022 and 2023. And we only considered umpires with more than 20 games behind the plate last season, with one glaring exception.

10. Emil Jimenez

Jimenez was a rookie umpire in 2023 and consequently he makes his debut on this list after a truly awful season. He was formerly a minor league umpire who had stints in the Venezuelan League and the Dominican Summer League. His brother, Edwin, was also a rookie umpire in 2023. Just to be clear, Edwin is much better at his job.

In 26 games behind the plate, Emil's 93.2 percent accuracy was seventh-worst, his CCAx was -8 and his average consistency was 92.8 percent, which ranked fourth-worst. His xAcc was 93.4, which ranked eight-worst, and his AAx was -0.2, which was 12th worst. So he ranks near the bottom of all the statistical categories that matter here. He also had 15 games in which he missed 10 or more calls. That's atrocious.