Saturday, October 20, 2018

Greg Gibson follows West with Near-Perfecto in NLCS

Greg Gibson capped off Game 7 of the Dodgers-Brewers National League Championship Series with a 99.3% score behind home plate, echoing umpire Joe West's similar near-perfect feat in the ALCS earlier in the week. Gibson saw 142 callable pitches and missed just one of them, making Gibson and West the only two umpires in UEFL postseason history to call games with just one pitch in error.

Had West not achieved his 159-of-160 (99.4%) game in Game 3 of the ALCS in Houston, Gibson's mark would have set a UEFL record; as it stands, Gibson finds himself in second place behind West, having seen 18 less pitches than West (141/142 = 99.3%).
Related PostJoe West Sets % Record in Near-Perfect Game in ALCS (10/16/18).

Gibson did set a new record, however, for longest consecutive innings of perfection; he took a perfect score into the bottom of the 9th inning Saturday night at Miller Park, where only a Clayton Kershaw 1-0 offering to Brewers batter Jesus Aguilar, who ultimately struck out swinging, stood in the way of numerical exactitude. Kershaw's 1-0 pitch, ruled a strike, was located just one tenth of an inch outside of the borderline range.

The NLCS has been the only series, other than the one-off Wild Card Games, to go the distance thus far in the 2018 postseason, and Gibson therefore has been the only umpire to officiate a winner-take-all game for a multi-game series (e.g., Division Series and League Championship Series rounds). In such a pivotal game, though the playing score may not have dictated its importance, it speaks well that the most statistically accurate umpiring plate performance of the series belonged to its Game 7 umpire.

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