The Most Consequential Missed Call in Every Season, 2021-2025
Five seasons. Five game-changing blown calls. Every one was a ball called strike on a 3-2 count. Every one would have been overturned by ABS.
Every season, thousands of pitches get called wrong. Most of them don't matter much — a missed call on 0-0 in the 3rd inning of a blowout barely registers. But a handful of missed calls each year land in exactly the wrong moment: full count, late innings, game on the line. These are the calls that change outcomes.
Using win probability impact — how much a missed call shifted the likelihood of each team winning — we identified the single most consequential missed call in every season from 2021 through 2025. Five seasons. Five pitches. Five umpires who got the biggest call of the year wrong.
Every single one was a ball called a strike.
2025: Brian O'Nora Rings Up Jakob Marsee
September 9 — WSH @ MIA, 8th inning
WPA Impact: 43.4 percentage points
The biggest blown call of 2025 — and one of the biggest in our entire five-year dataset. Jakob Marsee stepped in with a 3-2 count in the 8th inning of a tight game between the Nationals and Marlins. The pitch was outside the zone. Brian O'Nora called it strike three.
The call swung win probability by 43.4 percentage points. At VERY HIGH leverage (LI 3.0+), the difference between a walk and a strikeout in that spot is the difference between a rally and a dead inning. O'Nora's call ended the at-bat, ended the threat, and materially changed the game's outcome probability.
O'Nora, incidentally, also appears on the 2021 worst-calls list. Some names keep showing up.
2024: James Hoye Catches Dylan Moore Looking
April 17 — CIN @ SEA, 7th inning
WPA Impact: 34.6 percentage points
Dylan Moore was at the plate with a full count in the 7th inning at T-Mobile Park. The Reds were visiting the Mariners in an early-season game that was anything but meaningless. The pitch missed the zone. James Hoye called it strike three.
This wasn't a borderline pitch that could go either way — it cleared our 0.5-inch borderline margin, meaning it was definitively outside the rulebook zone even accounting for Hawk-Eye's measurement precision.
2024 actually produced a three-way tie for worst call at -0.346 WPA. Mark Wegner (NYY @ DET, March 23) and Tripp Gibson (OAK @ CLE, April 21) both had calls with identical WPA impact in the 7th inning on 3-2 counts. The game state — inning, outs, runners, score differential — was similar enough to produce the same win probability swing.
2023: Phil Cuzzi Squeezes Ryan O'Hearn
July 30 — NYY @ BAL, 8th inning
WPA Impact: 43.4 percentage points
The biggest missed call of 2023 matched 2025's worst for sheer WPA magnitude. Ryan O'Hearn was batting with a full count in the 8th inning of a Yankees-Orioles game — a division rivalry with playoff implications. Phil Cuzzi called a pitch outside the zone strike three.
The 43.4% WPA swing means the game's expected outcome flipped dramatically on a single incorrect call. O'Hearn, a left-handed hitter, was facing a strike zone that Cuzzi had been expanding all night. The umpire's handedness splits for this game would show the pattern.
Cuzzi retired after the 2023 season. This was one of his final plate appearances behind the dish.
2022: Brian Knight Gets Ian Happ
September 19 — CHC @ MIA, 9th inning
WPA Impact: 43.5 percentage points
The worst call of 2022 — and the single worst in our entire five-year dataset by a fraction of a point. Ian Happ stood in with a 3-2 count in the 9th inning at loanDepot Park. Brian Knight called a pitch outside the zone strike three.
September 19. The Cubs were in the thick of the wild card conversation. Every game mattered. And this game's outcome probability shifted by nearly half on one pitch that wasn't a strike.
David Rackley had an equally bad call the same season: Joey Bart of the Giants was rung up on a 3-2 pitch in the 10th inning against the Phillies on May 31, also swinging WPA by 43.5%. Two calls, same impact, same season.
2021: Mike Estabrook on the Fourth of July
July 4 — LAD @ WSH, 9th inning
WPA Impact: 43.5 percentage points
Independence Day, 2021. The Dodgers were at Nationals Park. Chris Taylor was at the plate with a 3-2 count in the 9th inning. Mike Estabrook called a ball strike three.
The call swung 43.5% of win probability — tied with 2022 for the largest single-call WPA impact in our database. Taylor's at-bat should have ended with a walk. Instead it ended with a strikeout. The difference between those two outcomes in the 9th inning of a close game is staggering, and the math confirms what anyone watching would have felt: this one pitch changed the game.
The Pattern
Five seasons, five worst calls. Some consistencies jump out:
All five were balls called strikes. Not a single "worst call of the year" was a strike called a ball. This makes intuitive sense — a phantom strike three ends an at-bat and potentially an inning, while a phantom ball just changes the count. The finality of a called third strike amplifies the WPA impact.
All five came on 3-2 counts. A full count is the highest-impact moment for a called pitch because the call is terminal: it's either a walk or a strikeout. Our count run values show that a missed call on 3-2 has a run value of 0.528 — nearly 5x the impact of a missed call on 0-0 (0.071).
All five came in the 7th inning or later. Late-game calls carry more WPA weight because win probability is more volatile when fewer innings remain. A 9th-inning missed call in a tie game can swing WPA by 40%+. The same call in the 3rd inning might swing it by 5%.
The WPA impact clusters around 43-44%. This isn't a coincidence. It reflects the maximum possible WPA swing for a single call in the specific game states where these calls occurred. When you're in a VERY HIGH leverage spot (LI 3.0+) with a 3-2 count in the 9th inning of a tie game, the WPA difference between a walk and a strikeout approaches the mathematical ceiling.
What ABS Would Have Fixed
Every one of these calls would have been challengeable under the 2026 ABS system. Every one would have been overturned — they all cleared our borderline margin by a comfortable distance, meaning they were definitively outside the zone.
Five seasons of data. Five game-changing calls. Five outcomes that would have been different with a cap tap and a camera system.
The ABS challenge system can't undo the past. But it can prevent the next entry on this list.
See the full worst-calls leaderboard for each season on our leaderboards page, or explore any of these games in detail on their individual game pages.