This obscures the fact that umpires are worse than 93% when the pitch is close to the boundary of being a ball or a strike (shadow zone). Obvious balls and obvious strikes are obvious, but umpire accuracy when it is close is only 81%, and their accuracy was even worse 15 years ago.
Right, but as that article notes, the numbers show it's an average of 4.5 pitches per team in the shadow zone in each game. And those pitches are not clear-cut instances where players will be confident in challenging, more like 50/50. So what remains is how teams decide to let their players use this finite challenge resource.
NaOH|5 months ago