John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.
It is that time of the year, when Brussels gets an Indian summer, the Yankees march to the World Series and baseball people complain about umpires blowing calls in the playoffs.
There is no question that calls, like groundballs, are sometimes mishandled. Here IS the question: Should we do something about it?
It is perhaps the most popular query in the world of sports in 2010. The favorite answer: instant replay. Many are the denizens of England who believe technology might have bounced their soccer squad miraculously past Germany in this year’s World Cup.
As far as our pastime goes, there are three schools of thought:
1. Robot umpires. This is less crazy than it sounds. Balls and strikes can already be determined by laser technology. Some spring training games have already been umpired this way. It’s a matter of time before sensors inside the ball and on the uniform can determine a tag play. Ever played lazer tag?
2. Instant replay. As in the NFL, managers should have the right to “challenge” calls they believe have been missed. Video playback would then determine the truth.
3. Conservative. In no way should technology be used on the baseball field.
I confess to being a conservative. I think blown calls matter much less than baseball people think they matter. Two examples:
Last week, Michael Young of Texas swings at strike three. He should’ve been sat down. The ump ruled he checked his swing. Ball three. Next pitch: fastball down the middle. Young hits a three-run homer.
All the Rays could talk about after the game was the checked swing. But I think they lost because Chad Qualls first threw two pitches outside the zone and then grooved the 3-2 pitch. The Rays also let two guys reach base before Young, allowed three other runs, and batted like babies. I’ve seen this phenomenon in European baseball. Lose 13-12 in the 9th on a throwing error by the second baseman, and everybody gets pissed at him. But that’s not why you lost. You lost because you gave up 13 runs.
Along these same lines, the most famous blown call in Orioles history is Jeffrey Maier taking away the homerun ball from Tony Tarasco in the 1996 ALCS.
OK, it was fan interference, but for that ball to be there in the first place, Armando Benitez made a bad pitch and Derek Jeter still hit it 320 feet to rightfield. The Orioles lost just as much because Armando couldn’t keep the ball down and Derek Jeter’s a great hitter as because the kid interfered. And they also lost because the score was 4-3 going into the 9th and not 5-2 or 3-1. And then they lost three other games in the series.
In baseball, if two teams play about the same in a single game or season, the outcome is determined by luck, be it the odd bad call or the wind or the bloop hit, so stop complaining about the umpire – it belongs to the category of the uncontrollable — and worry about playing the game clearly better than the other team, which is the only guarantee of success.
A friend and reader, a Europe scout for a Major League team, writes in to suggest a fourth school of thought: Keep stats for umpires, and “adjusted” stats for players, in other words, their stats had no calls been missed. “Hire a scorekeeper whose job it is to go through video after a game and review all plays that were blown,” he writes me. “I wouldn’t want the stats to really be a means of looking at a specific umpire on a daily basis, but more to see what impact their bad calls actually have. We know umpires will blow calls, just as players will make errors and strikeout. The objective of the exercise is to see if their mistakes are costing anyone something.”
We could publish umpire baseball cards. Collect your favorites. That’s an idea that should be replayed.
Send your rants on umpires to oldworldpastime@gmail.com