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MLB Umpires Continue Month-Long Campaign to Be Replaced by Robots

Oct 30, 2009, 3:30 PM UTC

This World Series already had Cliff Lee being sickeningly dominant and rain that did more to beautify the HD broadcasts of games than disrupt them. Filling out the troika of 2009 post-season hallmarks only took waiting for the umpires to blow a call or two.â†µâ†µGuess what happened last night?â†µ

â†µâ†µOn a play in the seventh inning, Ryan Howard either speared or trapped a liner by Johnny Damon, then threw to second, where Jimmy Rollins tagged Jorge Posada. The ruling, an inning-ending double play, seems pretty bad a day after the fact. (“Did I catch it?” Howard said, later. “Well, he called him out.”) But the first base umpire was behind Howard, in no position to see whether the ball bounced, and that one goes down as a tough call.â†µ

â†µâ†µAnd so, because it wasn’t even unquestionably the worst call in the game, another dubious ruling in the eighth inning is in the ledes of today’s “these umpires are terrible” stories, mostly for recency’s sake.â†µ

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â†µâ†µThat’s when a Yankees double play by Robinson Cano and Derek Jeter appeared, on replay, to only get Shane Victorino at second, as Chase Utley beat Jeter’s throw to first by about a nanosecond. This ended the eighth and erased a chance to have Howard come to bat with two men on; it was also a bang-bang call (a “whacker,” said first base umpire Brian Gorman) that would be hard to definitively rule correctly without replay. â†µ

â†µâ†µAnother tough call, to be sure, but a call that could have been decided more accurately with the use of replay.â†µ

â†µâ†µIsn’t accuracy an important part of every baseball game, when each out is almost 4 percent of a nine-inning game? And wouldn’t instant replay helping get those calls right improve the quality of the product for fans who shake their head at the uncertainty of the human element?â†µ

â†µâ†µThose hoping that we are on an inexorable march to an expansion of instant replay in baseball might do well to remember this sport has Bud Selig for a commissioner:â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥â‡¥“The more baseball people I talk to, there is a lot of trepidation about it and I think their trepidation is fair,” Selig told reporters before Game 2 of the World Series on Thursday. “I’ve spent a lot of time [on this] over the past month and will spend a lot of time in the ensuing months as well. I don’t want to overreact. You can make light of that but when you start to think you’re going to have more intrusions -- and even if [sic] their good intrusions -- it’s something that you have to be very careful about. Affecting the game on the field is not something I really want to do.”â‡¥â‡¥â†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥â‡¥Selig has not been quick to embrace new technology over baseball tradition, in part due to worries about the pace of games.â‡¥â‡¥â†µâ‡¥
â†µâ‡¥â‡¥â†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥â‡¥“Life is changing and I understand that,” he said. “I do like the human element and I think the human element for the last 130 years has worked pretty well. There have been controversies but there are controversies in every sport.”â‡¥â‡¥â†µâ‡¥

â†µâ†µâ†µBud seems woefully out of touch, doesn’t he? Valuing the tradition of the human element and listening to the “trepidation” of “baseball people” is nice and quaint, but no way to run any business that needs accuracy and could see a boost with the smart implementation of a new system. The concerns about game length shouldn’t be the central problem -- people will complain about prospective four-hour, five-minute games like they complain about four-hour games now. â†µ

â†µâ†µMore importantly, dragging feet on instant replay just gives sports fans under the age of 25 another reason to dismiss baseball as the sport of codgers or, worse, their parents. If baseball wants a prosperous future, it would do well to stop acting like the most important thing to consider in decision-making is its past.â†µ

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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

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