Blown Job: Umpiring is Full of Humans

We all know what happened to Armando Galarraga last week.  Even Bud Selig probably knows at this point.

Surely, Mr. Selig would step in and right what was oh so clearly wrong.  And, showing all the usefulness and functionality of an empty gym sock lying on the floor, Bud Selig did what Bud Selig does; the same thing he did when he found out truckloads of illegal performance enhancers were polluting the league:  nothing.

The call remained as it was, even though the guy who made it even said it was wrong, and baseball is still without an instant replay safeguard to prevent gutwrenching tragedies like this from happening again.

But this travels deeper than the MLB commissioner’s interest in laying low until his retirement.  Why does baseball skirt the instant replay?  What is the appeal of keeping the game so human?

When you get down to it, as much they are supposed to be a part of the field, or at least, mindless automatons who objectively call everything as correct as possible, an umpire is a human being.  They have to stop to tie their shoes.  Some have way too much raw lard in their diets.  They cut themselves shaving, they run red lights, they lose the remote, they hit squirrels on the highway.  They make mistakes.  They’re human beings.

And in the end, that defeats the whole purpose.  There’s no way–zero–that you could send an organic human person onto a baseball field and have them make the right call 100% of the time.  It can’t be done.

Which is one of several main differences that separates baseball from other sports that have clocks or 20 pounds of armor to wear or no five to ten minute lulls between instances when the ball is actually in play.  Baseball, for whatever reason, relies heavily on the human eye, and the human eye is usually in the head of a human.  And human’s aren’t flawless.

In recent years, there seems to be somewhat of a downfall in the credibility of Major League umpiring.  The 2009 post season was for some reason a festival of horse shit calls, culminating with Joe Mauer’s “foul” double that would have brought in some much needed runs for the Twins against the Yankees.

So… why?  Why are we allowing our game to be ruled over by these people?  What makes them so special?  Some of them are complete idiots.  Others, like Jim Joyce, are respectable people who can show a shred of humanity when they need to.  Some see the appeal in the “human” nature of the game.

But to be human is to sometimes be wrong.  Are we saying we would rather have umpires be infallible because they have the ability to be incorrect?  What is the benefit in making them the end-all be-all on the field?

What makes umpires look so good is that making instant replay available would be so tricky.  Baseball already moves as quickly as a corpse floating in a lake.  To have to take a break every 15 minutes because guys like Joe Girardi or Joe Maddon want to take another look at a pitch would extend the average game time by an hour.

But any fan who has been on the receiving end of a blown call, especially in the post season or a perfect game or just the bottom of the 9th, will tell you that they would gladly take the extra chunk of time in exchange for the right call to be made.  To know that your team did everything they could, succeeded, and still got screwed is to have a piece of your soul ripped out and fed to a pack of ferocious dogs.  You feel powerless.  You feel empty.  You are forced to come to terms with the idea that no matter how hard you try, you can’t reach through the TV screen and strangle somebody. There is nothing that can be done, and it makes baseball all the more horrifying:  what’s done is done.  There’s no going back.

Moonlight Graham knew it, and all he had to do was stop a little girl from choking to death.

You can say that Jim Joyce’s shitty call didn’t effect the game, and it was just a personal milestone for Galarraga, but that’s a meaningless observation.  The point is, this kind of stuff happens, and soon, it’s going to happen in some really bang-bang, fucked up way, and the “keep the game human” defense is going to sound like a bunch of fogeys screaming at a little league game from their antique lawn chairs.

Bill Pollock of Missourinet explains in his podcast that you can’t pick and choose which parts of baseball are reviewable. If you’re going to allow instant replay, then you allow it to be applied to everything.  There should be no criteria, there should be no certain amount of times a manager can challenge a call; if they’re going to allow it, it should just be allowed, and that’s that.

I see the romanticized vision of baseball that comes with relying on humans to make the calls.  I see it as being part of the game’s natural beauty, and how it harks back to a time when guys were playing on real grass without gloves or helmets or endorsement deals.  It’s an old-fashioned concept that is distinct and very cool.

Except when it isn’t.

There is going to be stupidity, mistakes, and frustration, no matter what the deciding factor for a play at the plate will be in the future.  The real issue is, do we stay with our currently messed up system, or do we shift to a brand new one and discover in the coming years what new ways we’ve created to screw ourselves?  The reason this comes up is because we want to be able to depend on umpiring, whether its done by people or video monitors, as a solid form of calling the game.  Nobody wants to have to make a play and then wonder whether what actually happened and what the ump saw are going to be the same thing.

So when you say that mistakes are “just part of the game,” think about what it felt like to be in St. Louis in ’85. Or Baltimore in ’96.  Or Minnesota in ’09.

Wouldn’t you want to at least try to see if something else works?

But honestly, in the vein of blown calls, I’d take this all back.  Every argument for instant replay, every complaint I’ve ever made against an umpire; every fist through the wall, every cry toward the heavens, every frustrating, shit-pissing, chair-hurling, tears-of-blood, insult chock full of Turkish profanity I’ve ever uttered… I’d take it all back.

If only someone would please just punch Jeffrey Maier’s teeth down his throat.

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