In its August 13 article, Time.com asks the question: "Are Baseball Umpires Racist?" As you can imagine, the title itself suggests the answer.

The article begins with this ominous opening:

Bad calls by the ump are as much a part of baseball as home run records, rabid fans and watery beer, but a new study shows that an umpire's decision may have a disturbing ulterior motive: racism.

The ammunition for this surprising claim is a recently-released study by Daniel Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Hamermesh, with the support of several economics professors, studied over two million pitches throw in Major League Baseball games from 2004 to 2006.

From the study, Hamermesh concluded that: