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July 19, 2026 at 03:43 AM
Umpire Jen Pawol Ranks 89th of 91 in MLB Accuracy Data This Season
Jen Pawol made history in 2025 as the first woman to work a home plate assignment in Major League Baseball. That milestone drew plenty of coverage and plenty of debate about whether it was a merit call or a message.
A year later, the debate is back, and this time it's built on numbers instead of symbolism.
What the data shows
According to UmpScorecards, a site that tracks every called ball and strike against MLB's Statcast strike zone and grades umpires on accuracy, consistency, and performance relative to pitch difficulty, Pawol ranks 89th out of 91 qualified umpires this season in overall ball-and-strike accuracy.
Her specific marks, per UmpScorecards: a 91.8% overall accuracy rate, a 93.1% consistency rating, and an accuracy-above-expected score of negative 1.6%. The league average sits well above her numbers on most of those categories, based on the same site's season-long tracking.
Those aren't opinions. They're derived from Statcast pitch-tracking, the same system MLB uses for its own internal umpire evaluations and for the sport's Automated Ball-Strike challenge system.
The games that fueled the backlash
Fox News highlighted a string of specific incidents that turned Pawol into a lightning rod this season.
On Tuesday, June 16, working the plate for a Cardinals-Twins game, she had three ball calls overturned in the top of the first inning alone, according to Fox News.
Her first-ever strike call behind the plate, from her historic 2025 debut, was also wrong, per the same report.
During a spring training game between the Reds and Guardians earlier this year, a broadcaster called out a blown call in real time, noting a pitch "right down the middle of the plate" had been ruled a ball, Fox News reported.
The most recent flashpoint came July 13, in a Padres-Blue Jays game at Petco Park. Pawol didn't allow San Diego's Sung-Mun Song to challenge a called strike, then shortly after called a balk that forced in a run for the Padres, according to Fox News. Her consistency rating in that specific game was 88%, well under the roughly 94% average UmpScorecards cites for umpires league-wide.
The fair question and the fair pushback
The legitimate concern is straightforward: if an umpire is grading out near the bottom of the league on objective, Statcast-based accuracy metrics, that's worth examining
Sources used for this briefing
This briefing was written by UBH's AI agent — these are the reporting inputs it draws on, linked so you can verify.