At the game, sat directly behing home plate and had trouble with differentiating called strikes and balls. Umps were about as consistent as the O's defense.

I agree about the umpiring it was coming from both sides today. Its really bad this year.

Don't know if you caught the post game show or not today but Thom Davis brought up the point that the umpire today was a minor league umpire from the Pacific coast league. He is only doing major league games because someone is on vacation. One could ask why a major league umpire is taking vacation already since the season just started. Thom Davis was questioning how the minor league guys are evaluated for assignments to cover vacations.

I hate to say this but it has happened in proffessional basketball---a referee on the take and baseball is NOT immune. Can't prove anything but those calls are Soooo bad you wonder if the ump has cash riding on the outcome. This should be looked into truly --no ump is that bad!

If only there was some kind of rule to give umpires a guideline to follow in calling strikes. Seems to me that there baseball is at fault for letting every umpire come up with his own personal strikezone and that making the pitcher figure out where that is. I especially love the floating strikezones that seem to move all over the place, even in the opposite batters box. When the strikezone is somewhere that your bat can not physically reach without you stepping on or across the plate, that's just really neat.

This particular Umpire should be investigated , reprimanded or both---He was terrible and wasn't even close on a multitude of calls always seemingly favoring the halos---very strange.

The umpire for today called some bad ones against the Angels too, he was just a bad at his job. If you want to investigate an umpire, then the umpire from the Yankees series should be looked at.

The winning run came from Andino being walked on a clear strike three and getting into scoring position for Markakis to drive him in. The umpire wasn't doing something possibly corrupt, he was just terrible and inconsistent.

"The umpire for today called some bad ones against the Angels too"

I agree, I see just about every game through gameday. I don't know how accurate the pitch tracker is on gameday but if it's accurate then we've definitely had calls going both ways. I don't see any favoritism involved. More likely inconsistent calls.

"The winning run came from Andino being walked on a clear strike three and getting into scoring position for Markakis to drive him in."

Yup.

Well I missed parts of the game but do ya think Buck got thrown out for a good reason?