A new study by a professor at the University of Texas at Austin suggests that home plate umpires call balls and strikes more favorably when the pitcher is their same race, Time magazine reported.

The research team led Daniel Hamermesh, professor of economics, found that umpires call strikes more for pitchers of their race and balls more when the pitcher is of another race, Time said.

The study found that the disparity occurred in 1 percent of pitches. The researchers analyzed 2.1 million umpire calls between the 2004 and 2006 seasons, Time said.

"One pitch called the other way affects things a lot," Hamermesh said. "Baseball is a very closely played game."

Hamermesh added that even a slight bias by umpires will affect the kinds of pitches that pitchers make if they believe they are getting squeezed by the umps. Pitchers who are getting balls called too much might start throwing over the middle of the plate more, thus resulting in batters getting fat pitches to hit, Time said.

Seventy-one percent of major-league pitchers and 87 percent of umpires are white.

Hamermesh said he and his research team found no bias when it came to batters. They found that the lowest percentage of strikes were called when the pitcher was black and the umpire was white, Time said.

But Hamermesh's team found that there was no pitch bias in three instances: on a full count, when the crowd was large, or when officials were using QuesTec, an electronic system that evaluates umpires' accuracy, Time said.

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"The umpires hate those [QuesTec] systems," Hamermesh said. "When you're going to be watched and have to pay more attention, you don't subconsciously favor people like yourself. When discrimination has a price, you don't observe it as much.

"We all have these subconscious preferences for our own group," Hamermesh said. "It's important to look at it in baseball because of the amount of money that's being made — the salary of the umpires, baseball players and the amount of revenue that's being made by the industry. All these things make this important.

"I expect that [MLB] will not be very happy about this, but the fact that with a little bit of effort this kind of behavior can be altered, that's very gratifying. I wish with society as a whole we could reduce the impact of discrimination as easily as it could be done in baseball."

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