In fact I have umpired myself. So I know what I’m talking about. Humans cannot calls balls and strikes with perfect consistency. I was pointing out fact, not whining - in fact if you actually read my post, you will note I said nary a word of complaint about the people who ump. I was making the absolutely undeniable point that they are being asked to do a job a human can’t actually do anywhere close to perfectly.
We hold them to a higher standard because sports aren’t about the officials. If Steve the Shortstop makes an error, that is an intrinsic part of baseball. Baseball is a contest of physical skill; avoiding and making physical errors in the execution of a sport is a fundamental part of what a sport is. Steve’s error detracts from his team’s chances of winning, but it is not a detraction from the sport; every success is a failure for the other side, every failure a success for the other side. Player successes and failures always even out, and the total balance determines the winners and the losers. Officiating mistakes detract from the sport as a whole. They impose failures upon players that the players did not deserve, that are outside their skills and performance as athletes.
A sport is NOT a contest of officiating skill. The umpire is not a player and has no side in the game. You can play baseball with no umpires at all, if you like. That’s how my friends and I played when we were kids. You cannot play baseball without players.
There are hundreds of sports where human judgment has been replaced with machines. Imagine if the Olympics decided “to hell with electronic timekeeping, let’s have guys with stopwatches just eyeball who won the 100m race, like it was in the olden days.” Nobody wants that because the race is about the racers, not the officials.
There’s a big difference between a race and a baseball game. In a baseball game, whether I’m playing or watching, I want immediate feedback on whether the pitch was a ball or a strike. In the 100m, if there’s a photo finish, you can wait while seventeen different video angles are analyzed to see whose nostril hairs snuck across the line first*.
Is there going to be no audio feedback for the hitter at the plate? Does the home plate [del]umpire[/del] on-looker wait for the computer to put the result of each pitch on some board that’s not distracting the hitter’s line of sight, and then call it out?
I’d rather that they either fix the rules to match the called upper bounds of the strike zone which should be mid-chest, per the rules, and not the belly button, which is what is actually called.
I don’t see any reason why the computerized system wouldn’t be able to give you immediate audio feedback if that’s the way they wanted to do it. Right now, the way they’re doing (or will be doing it starting Apr 25 in the Independent Atlantic League) is that the umpire wears an earpiece where the system tells whether it’s a ball or strike. The umpire will be able to override a call, and the system doesn’t judge checked swings.
I’m all for it, provided that it works well, of course. We’ll see how it works out in that minor league.
I think what you might be looking for is a foot fault of the center line. This is rarely called because it’s an invisible extension of the centerline (and if a ref called one of these at match point I think it would be a legitimate for the server to protest, loudly). It’s hard to believe McEnroe wouldn’t be aware of this rule, that you have to be on the correct side of the court as well as behind the service line, but it’s perfectly understandable if he’s never seen it called, either when he was a player or when he was a commentator.
I foresee delays because there are delays in the return on television broadcasts. Usually the pitcher already has the ball back and is taking signals from the catcher by the time the networks can replay the feed. Adding a couple seconds onto each pitch is exactly the opposite of the way baseball is going, and should be going. I’d much rather deal with normal human error and very slightly different strike zones by individual umps than stretch each game out by an extra 20 minutes while the umpire waits for the robots to suggest whether a ball was a strike or ball, and for him to decide whether he agrees with it or not.
That’s the only reason Don Drysdale got his scoreless innings record. He hit Giants batter Dick Dietz and the umps decided suddenly to enforce that rule which prevented a run from scoring with the bases loaded. It was rigged.
Looks pretty instantaneous here. This doesn’t seem like something that would take seconds or even tenths of seconds of processing time. From watching that video, I see the ball location pop up as the catcher closes his mitt (literally–nudging the video frame-by-frame in the next close-up example the location is marked on the first frame the catcher has his mitt closed.)
To be honest, RickJay, while I quoted your post I didn’t mean to call you out for criticizing umpires … my intention was to point to the opinions reflected in Brother Cadfael’s original post, not your response to him. I always appreciate your insights in baseball, and I apologize if you thought my post was directed at you.
I agree that officials are asked to do the nearly impossible, and technology and video review is exacerbating that pressure. Frankly, though, I’m still okay with a little bit of the “human element” coming into play with officiating, especially when the encroachment of technology starts to have an adverse effect on the enjoyment of watching a game (video reviews can really mess with the pace and the viewing experience of football and, increasingly, baseball). We should strive for perfection, but we need to remember we will never always get it perfect. I’m coming around to the notion of electronic ball/strike calls, I think I can live with that. But technology will never be able to completely replace human officials.
I was going to call you out on the “human element” by reiterating RickJay’s point about the game not being about the officials… but I won’t. I actually agree with you.
Video replay, particularly slow motion, has made it so that officials can “zapruder” the play to find the smallest scrap of technically correct information to support a call that would never have been made in the 100+ year history of the sport. Sports are entertainment, what’s entertaining about that?
It’s not that it’s OK to have wrong calls, but calls that are made by humans should only be held to the standard that they should appear correct when viewed with the unaided eye.
Agreed. On stolen bases especially. For 100+ years, if the ball beat the runner and the runner did not obviously avoid the tag, then the runner was out. Now, we get to look at three different angles to see if a finger came in beside the tag.
Then we get the altogether new “out” call in that situation where the infielder holds the ball on the runner if he is safe and we analyze whether we can see one single frame of video where the runners hand came off of the base before he put his foot on it.
That is not merely taking the human element or mistakes out of officiating, but creating a new standard of safe/out which is imperceptible to the naked eye. That was not what replay was sold as. It was only supposed to be for the “worst of the worst” calls.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that being called as a foot fault. I can’t really see why anyone would complain if it was called though, it should be fairly easy to tell if the server is standing over where the line would be (I’m assuming we’re talking line 6 here) unless they’re well behind the baseline which would be unusual.
FINA rule D.8.5.4 states that any dive that is judged to be too close to the platform or springboard shall be awarded a maximum of 2 points. I think it’s an excellent rule for safety, but I never see it called.
I was at my first AAA game of the season and something happened that made me think of this thread.
At one point after the pitcher came set the batter raised his hand, asked for time, and stepped out of the box. The umpire **ignored **him, the pitcher **delivered **the pitch, and the umpire called it a… Ball. It would have been a better story I guess if the batter had struck out or something, but the pitch was outside and was called a ball.
This is one of the first times I think I’ve seen Rule 6.02(b) applied.
*The batter shall not leave his position in the batter’s box after the pitcher comes to Set Position, or starts his windup.
PENALTY: If the pitcher pitches, the umpire shall call “Ball” or “Strike,” as the case may be.
*
As for the pitch clock they went to a 15 second pitch clock this year and boy did that game fly by. You could tell the difference as the pitcher would get the ball back from the catcher and immediately toe the rubber and come set. They played a 9 inning 7-6 game with 17 hits and 4 pitching changes in about 2:15.
Soccer in Europe and almost anywhere not in the USA (and they may do it too)… generally the ref will only blow the final whistle once the last dramatic attack has ended. There are exceptions of course, but generally the refs will do this. Thats like in basketball if there was only one second left and the refs didnt start the timer til somebody got off a last shot.
Given that soccer doesn’t have an “accurate to the second” game time remaining clock visible to the players, this is one of the things I like about the way the game is officiated. No idea what, if any, rule support there is for the custom though.
I agree that video replay is simply too slow right now. To be perfectly honest, I really do not understand why reviews take as long as they do; 99 times out of 100, I, sitting at home, can tell from the first one or two replays, in under 30 seconds, whether the call should stand or not. How MLB doesn’t have half a dozen people with sharper eyes watching many angles simultaneously on big monitors once a review is called for, I really don’t understand. They have the budget. Waiting three-five minutes to fix a call is just terrible.
To my mind, though, using Statcast or PitchFX or whatever it is now to call balls and strikes would not delay the game. It would if anything speed it up just by not having bitching and moaning and arguing over balls and strikes. Furthermore, it’s the biggest improvement you could make to the fairness of the officiating. Blowing a call on a stolen base is bad, but honestly in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t happen that often and rarely affects the outcomes of a game. A dozen or more blown ball/strike calls happen in every game, and an umpire having a bad game can blow two dozen or more, and they are not distributed equally in a game or even over the course of many games. The game is decided in the strike zone and it shouldn’t be decided by the ump if a better system could be implemented.
The comparison I often go to here is professional tennis. Tennis is a MUCH better officiated sport, and has been for a long time, I would assume because it just isn’t as tired to “let’s do it this way because we always have” and a strong, irritating official’s union. Tennis uses far more officials despite being played in a much smaller space; a major championship match has ELEVEN judges, plus the guys in the booth watching the computers. They do this simply because it makes sense to have people watching every possible angle. Then as soon as the technology was available they started using it because it is simply the case that humans can’t make all those calls perfectly; they started using Cyclops to judge close serve calls in the late 70s or early 80s, and have been using even more advanced systems for all kinds of close calls for a few years now, because getting it right is what matters to them. A tennis match, however, seems to move along very nicely, and if anything electronic judging has sped things up because there aren’t as many arguments as there used to be. John McEnroe couldn’t do today when he did 35 years ago because he would have no one to insult.
Added time is almost completely at the discretion of the ref. There’s no “don’t stop an attack in progress” direction in the official laws, but it’s within the stated powers of the ref to extend added time for that reason.