The bolded more than anything else is what I find so frustrating. They have systems in place to grade these guys. They know what their records are. Yet they still give them post-season assignments where their well-known shortcomings can impact a game or a series in a negative way.
I'm generally a pro-union guy but this is one case where unions are bad for business.
I'm also a pro-union guy, but I don't think we need to assume that unions will always make deleterious choices. The union is its members, and could absolutely choose to be part of the solution here, just as (keeping things to baseball) the players' union chose to participate in the drug testing scheme. For instance, you could imagine a world in which
the Umpires Association trained, graded and selected the best umpires for post-season play, presumably with some sort of league input. (If the relationships between the league and its various unions end up more adversarial than that, well, it takes two to tango.)
I know they're not Wagner Act unions, but that's basically what professional associations like medical boards and bar associations are. Or hell, something like the IBEW. They self-organize and self-police themselves to maintain a high professional standard because it is in all of their interest to boost trust in their profession. It's bad for the profession if lawyers are out there dipping into funds held in trust, or whatever. It's bad for business if buildings keep burning down due to faulty electrical work, so the union has a hand in training and licensing electricians.
One thing that I would point out is that things are actually getting better. The younger umpires are, on the whole, considerably better than the older ones. Looking around in the Umpire Scorecards' data, the best umpire is probably John Libka: he's 34, and over a large sample, he's been right 95.6% of the time. That's pretty amazing. Will Little, Jason Visconti, Manny Gonzalez, Junior Valentine are other relatively young guys near the top of the leaderboards.
This
WSJ article notes the age difference, but interprets it as an age effect rather than a cohort effect. I don't think it provides much persuasive evidence for that assertion beyond the correlation. I find it far more plausible that the younger umps have worked under the Questec system for their whole careers, and that shows in their accuracy. The older guys learned how to ump pre-Questec and then had that system shoehorned into their work. I guess we'll see whether, as the Libkas of the world age into their 50s and 60s, they can maintain that standard of excellence.
So one thing the union could do to help would be to stop insisting quite so much on seniority for playoff assignments. We could staff the playoffs entirely with 94+% accurate umpires if we wanted, but instead we're out here with Laz Diaz and his meager 91.9% average (the 87.6% figure in last night's game was terrible even for him). There are generally 150-200 ball-strike calls in a typical game, so each percentage point of accuracy makes a meaningful difference.