Q: Are baseball umpires racist?

You can be my ace pitcher it don't matter if you're black or white.

A: That's the question posed by Time in regards to a recent study led by an economist at UT-Austin, and the answer may surprise you:

The highest percentage of strikes were called when both the home-plate umpire and pitcher were white, and the lowest percentage were called between a white ump and a black pitcher. The study also found that minority umpires judged Asian pitchers more unfairly than they did white pitchers. It’s a significant disadvantage for Asian pitchers because the MLB doesn’t have any Asian umpires. Interestingly enough, Hamermesh’s research found that the race of the batter didn’t seem to matter...

Still, as J.C. "The Baseball Economist" Bradbury writes, the better question may be the less sensationalist one: Does race influence umpires?. And the answer is Yes, slightly, but probably not consciously. Money quote:

The good news is that the effect of the bias is very small, a little less than one pitch per game. And I don’t think there is much that can be done to alter this, as it is probably the result of something deeply rooted in the human psyche. I don’t believe that umpires set out to make calls along racial lines, it just happens.

As Bradbury notes, "the discrimination that exists shrinks in QuesTec ballparks, when the umpires are being monitored." That doesn't necessarily imply the umpires are making a conscious effort to be more color-blind — but it does strongly suggest they're more committed to making accurate calls.

Not to digress too far into baseball nerdery, but the umpires union should stop being such crybabies about QuesTec. Of course, in the post-Tim Donaghey era, they may not have a choice.