How much money do major league baseball umpires make

how much money do major league baseball umpires make

Major League Baseball's umpires are all over the news after a spate of, er, questionable calls throughout this postseason. Despite larger postseason umpiring crews that include two extra umps in the outfield, it feels like an inordinate number of calls have gone the wrong way. All of these gaffes have prompted renewed debate about whether baseball should start using instant replay. How could umps blow this many calls that are so obvious when viewed in slow motion?

Aren't these guys trained professionals?

The Average Yearly Income for Major League Umpires | sanapidyqel.web.fc2.com

Are they handsomely rewarded? What do we really know about the men in blue, anyway? After some spotty officiating in the NFL last fall, we did some digging on the officials in the four major sports. Here's what we found:. We'll get to those in a minute.

That cash comes with responsibilities, though. In addition to relaying the calls to the teams and fans, a ref is also the crew chief, or leader, of the seven-man officiating team that also includes an umpire, a field judge, a back judge, a line judge, a side judge, and a head linesman.

Between spring training, a game schedule, and the postseason, being an MLB ump is a job that takes up most of the year.

They are, however, well cared-for while on the road. They also get four weeks of paid vacation during the regular season. These guys hang onto their jobs, too; on average, there's only one opening for a new big league ump each season.

NBA refs are similarly well compensated. If you can skate and survive the occasional lockout, NHL ref is hardly a bad job. Plus, free trips to Columbus and Raleigh!

Not all refs are rewarded this handsomely. As you might guess, refs in less popular sports command smaller salaries. According to a article on sports site scout. Some of them actually have pretty interesting jobs. He founded and co-owns Seirus Innovation, a ski apparel company. Prior to becoming a referee, he was better known as Dr. Walt Anderson, a dentist. He was an Army Reserve colonel during the Persian Gulf War, where he was awarded a bronze star.

In addition to being an NFL ref, he officiates NCAA hoops games and has drawn March Madness assignments in previous seasons. He's a trial lawyer in the Arizona firm Jones, Skelton, and Hochuli, which employs over 80 attorneys. How does one become a ref? Most of these guys have humble beginnings as officials.

Carey started officiating Pop Warner games in and gradually worked his way up through the college ranks. Eventually, he became an NFL side judge in and received a promotion to NFL referee, the pinnacle of football officiating, in Hochuli started as a Pop Warner ref in the early s; he was a law school student who needed a little extra pocket cash.

He then slowly made his way up through high school, junior college, and small conference college ball before getting a Pac gig. He eventually made it to the NFL in It's a slow build, but if you stick it out long enough and have some natural talent, you can be the one patting his head to signal an ineligible receiver downfield.

Still not convinced it's a tough ride? Check out this op-ed former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent wrote for the New York Times last weekend. He cites the paltry salaries for minor-league umps: Ethan Trex co-writes Straight Cash, Homey , the Internet's undisputed top source for pictures of people in Ryan Leaf jerseys.

Jacques Mattheij made a small, but awesome, mistake. He went on eBay one evening and bid on a bunch of bulk LEGO brick auctions, then went to sleep. Upon waking, he discovered that he was the high bidder on many, and was now the proud owner of two tons of LEGO bricks. This is about pounds. He wrote , "[L]esson 1: Much of the value of the bricks is in their sorting.

If he could reduce the entropy of these bins of unsorted bricks, he could make a tidy profit.

While many people do this work by hand, the problem is enormous—just the kind of challenge for a computer. In the following months, Mattheij built a proof-of-concept sorting system using, of course, LEGO. He broke the problem down into a series of sub-problems including "feeding LEGO reliably from a hopper is surprisingly hard," one of those facts of nature that will stymie even the best system design.

After tinkering with the prototype at length, he expanded the system to a surprisingly complex system of conveyer belts powered by a home treadmill , various pieces of cabinetry, and "copious quantities of crazy glue. Here's a video showing the current system running at low speed:. The key part of the system was running the bricks past a camera paired with a computer running a neural net-based image classifier.

That allows the computer when sufficiently trained on brick images to recognize bricks and thus categorize them by color, shape, or other parameters. Remember that as bricks pass by, they can be in any orientation, can be dirty, can even be stuck to other pieces.

The Average Yearly Income for Major League Umpires | sanapidyqel.web.fc2.com

So having a flexible software system is key to recognizing—in a fraction of a second—what a given brick is, in order to sort it out. When a match is found, a jet of compressed air pops the piece off the conveyer belt and into a waiting bin.

After much experimentation, Mattheij rewrote the software several times in fact to accomplish a variety of basic tasks. At its core, the system takes images from a webcam and feeds them to a neural network to do the classification.

how much money do major league baseball umpires make

Of course, the neural net needs to be "trained" by showing it lots of images, and telling it what those images represent. Mattheij's breakthrough was allowing the machine to effectively train itself, with guidance: Running pieces through allows the system to take its own photos, make a guess, and build on that guess. As long as Mattheij corrects the incorrect guesses, he ends up with a decent and self-reinforcing corpus of training data.

As the machine continues running, it can rack up more training, allowing it to recognize a broad variety of pieces on the fly. Here's another video , focusing on how the pieces move on conveyer belts running at slow speed so puny humans can follow. You can also see the air jets in action:. In an email interview, Mattheij told Mental Floss that the system currently sorts LEGO bricks into more than 50 categories.

It can also be run in a color-sorting mode to bin the parts across 12 color groups. Thus at present you'd likely do a two-pass sort on the bricks: He continues to refine the system, with a focus on making its recognition abilities faster.

At some point down the line, he plans to make the software portion open source. You're on your own as far as building conveyer belts, bins, and so forth. Check out Mattheij's writeup in two parts for more information. It starts with an overview of the story , followed up with a deep dive on the software. He's also tweeting about the project among other things.

And if you look around a bit, you'll find bulk LEGO brick auctions online—it's definitely a thing! Bedbugs are making their way back into modern life. Though the hard-to-shake pests were a relatively uncommon sight in the U.

But despite their newfound prevalence, most people may have trouble picking the wide-ranging blood-suckers out of a lineup. The New York Times reports that in a recent U. The study , conducted by researchers from the University of Kentucky, asked about people, both business and leisure travelers, if they could pick out which of these insects was a bedbug.

Only 28 percent of leisure travelers and 35 percent of business travelers picked the right bug. The correct answer is No. The lack of understanding about bedbugs could have implications for spreading infestations.

Only a third of travelers said they checked their hotel rooms for bedbugs before settling in. Not being able to recognize the bugs, though, could also lead to false alarms.

how much money do major league baseball umpires make

People might panic over seeing a bug in their house and call an exterminator, only to find that it was something relatively innocuous. University of Kentucky entomologist Michael Potter told the Times that people will bring him raisins and ask if they're bedbugs. And if people start panicking over a hotel infestation that doesn't exist, the hotel's reputation can suffer significantly.

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Subscribe To Our Newsletter! How Much Do These Umpires Get Paid? Here's what we found: Officials in other sports pull down more loot, but they have much more grueling schedules It's a Long Climb to the Top How does one become a ref? Man Buys Two Metric Tons of LEGO Bricks; Sorts Them Via Machine Learning. You can also see the air jets in action: Do You Know What a Bedbug Looks Like? Many Hotel Patrons Don't. What Do Dogs Dream About? Is the Heat Index Real?

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