Umpire has near perfect game behind the plate, a breakdown
What Happened
Jomboy flips his usual format on its head, spotlighting an umpire who actually nailed it instead of blowing calls. The ump is John Lipka, who reportedly turned in a 99 percent overall accuracy game behind the plate in May 2021, calling 90 of 90 true balls correctly and missing just one pitch all night. Jomboy walks through Lipka's track record, including a study citing him for the best 'bad call ratio' as a rookie in 2018. The one pitch Lipka technically missed, a strike he called a ball, came in an at-bat that later produced a home run for St. Louis, though Jomboy argues the miss didn't actually cause it.
Why This Matters
Most umpire content lives on outrage, so a 'good ump' breakdown is a rare flip that says something about how fans consume officiating. The video leans on public ball-strike scorecards, the same kind Josh Donaldson was tweeting at the time, which were reshaping how players and fans graded the men behind the plate. Lipka, a younger umpire who debuted in 2018, represented the analytics-era hire: precise, low-profile, and rated by data rather than reputation. The contrast with Angel Hernandez, name-checked here as routinely ranked among the worst, isn't subtle. This was two years before MLB began publicly experimenting with the Automated Ball-Strike system in the minors. Lipka's near-perfect grade became a small data point in the larger argument that human umpires can be elite, even as the robot-ump conversation kept building.
With 3.3M views, this ranks #41 of 1,583 Jomboy breakdowns, landing in the top 2.6% of the catalog despite praising an umpire instead of roasting one.
Key Moments
Who / What Is Involved
Players: John Lipka.
Key Terms Mentioned
Full Transcript
Click timestamps to jump to that momentwe had an umpire have a great game
behind the dish last week so i figured
i'd highlight it since i'm always
talking about when i'm
messed up and this guy had a great game
that curveball was a strike that
fastball no that's a click outside
this pitch no that's a click low broke
before the zone this one
nope that's low as well this one is
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so this umpire john libka i've never
heard of him because you don't really
hear about good umpires a lot
they he had a 99
overall accuracy overall consistency 99
outside zone accuracy 100 called 90 of
90 true balls correctly now
how accurate is whatever system is
generating this report i don't know but
everyone tends to just
believe these enough that we can like
base it off of something
i've never seen a report card this good
ever
and i never heard of this up like i said
but i should have want to know why we
all showed up because
when he was a rookie at 32 he had the
best what they're calling bad
call ratio of only 7.59
so he's kind of known for being really
good at calling balls and strikes
good for him this was a study done by
some college in 2018 oh
no the line right above is talking about
how Angel Hernandez
is routinely described as one of the
worst
oh yikes didn't think that would sneak
up on me but of course it did anyway
John Lipka great game by him calling
balls and strikes now they say
he only missed oh look at that he says
yep
that clipped it i liked it how about
that one no
no how about that one no no how about
that one
absolutely not and this one no
those are all off the plate that one he
liked it
came in Josh Donaldson tweeted
like these ump reports so even players
are looking at this twitter account who
tweets out these ump record
um score cards and they usually look
like this
usually all the balls that are outside
that are called strikes
they do the little circle and show you
like well this is what his own was
really like here's ron culpa
missed a lot of balls look at these
numbers look at these numbers
look at these numbers and then you know
you had lipka's
which was one call and that one call
i forgot the pitch this is it now
they're saying that's a strike
he called it a ball it is interesting
that the one pitch he quote unquote
missed
according to the scorecard in that
at-bat
it led to a home run for st louis
but the pitcher he threw more strikes in
the zone he didn't generate another
called striker swing and miss so
i don't think it played into the home
run but i just thought that was funny
that that happened but yeah dude i mean
real real cool
real good just wanted to put the name
out there John Lipka
if he's behind the dish know you're
going to get some consistency
because he's been doing it since 2018
his rookie year
good job by him i'm proud of him strike
game over there's a picture of me right
before i made this video
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consistent
umping in hair all wrapped into one umps
with hair
um better because younger um some better
so there's more
data and science