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.

Q: What do Don Imus and T.A.M.S.Y. have in common?

A: Last month, I received a delightful bit of news: surprisinger.com had become Google's top-ranked result for the query offensive asshole. Finally! After all these years of shouting my love from the rooftops, it warmed my cockles to discover Google was getting to know the real T.A.M.S.Y.

Of course, the mainstream media got totally threatened, and promptly retaliated. Now I'm playing second banana to some other guy from Cleveland.

THIS WILL NOT STAND. In an effort to retrieve my title, I hereby embark on a mission to offend every demographic on Earth, one by one. I'm starting with gay African Americans.

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So, hey, what's the deal with all these gay African Americans?


That's some snappy-threaded bros there. I'm gonna tell you that now, man, that's some — woo.

NEXT WEEK: Deceased Hawaiians. No, wait, I already did that one.

Man, this is going to be tough. I mean, Google is already aware of my brave stance on women.

Q: What is the most infuriating story you'll read in 2007?

A: It's still early, and there's plenty of 2007 left to be infuriated by, but I doubt you'll come across a story more absurdly, pointlessly horrible than that of Genarlow Wilson, the African-American former honor student currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for having received a blow job from a 15-year-old when he was 17.

No, you didn't misread that. Wilson's been in prison two years already.

Journalist Wright Thompson has the whole story, currently parked front and center on ESPN.com (and getting the bejeezus dugg out of it on Digg -- for the second time in as many months). Read it and weep.

It's about time this story is drumming up the attention/indignation it deserves, and you have to believe/hope something will be done to grant Wilson his freedom, and soon. But until that day, all the coverage in the world can't possibly provide due consolation for a young man so ruthlessly hijacked by the justice system.

RELATED: I first discovered the Genarlow Wilson story last month in the New York Times, via this tangentially related Daniel Radosh post on the fascinating complexities of kiddie porn laws.

I've been meaning to bring these topics over to T.A.M.S.Y., but they're such a Pandora's box can of worms (see: the crazed long-windedness of my response to Radosh) that I kept putting it off. Misguided sex laws drive me absolutely insane. Now that I've brought this up, expect me to never shut up about it ever again.