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The Rangers are among teams that keep scouting reports on umpires

ESPN has an interesting story on how teams are now maintaining detailed scouting reports, with charts and photos and the like.

Of particular interest is the discussion of detailed ball/strike tendencies for each umpire.  John Hirschbeck, who has some quotes in the article, suggests that those are meaningless, because every umpire calls the strike zone the same way.

The article starts out with comments from Ron Washington about the Rangers' use of this info...I would have assumed that every team does this, but apparently not.  Jim Leyland and Fredi Gonzalez are both quoted in the article, and seemingly have no clue that this information is even able to be gathered.