Gary Seymour, sports@wolfrivermedia.com
Technological advances have increased and will continue at such an exponential rate that years from now the baseball controversies involving freak-level success will no longer be whether someone is on steroids, but whether the player is really a person and not artificial intelligence.
For the time being, there is a different polemic afoot, with managers getting tossed at a steady rate for running their yap about balls and strikes.
Major League Baseball honcho Joe Torre issued an edict to managers, general managers and assistant general managers to lay off the video replay and stop bickering with the home plate umps, or else prepare to take a hit to the wallet.
His warning came in the wake of a spate of ejections of managers who got run after griping about calls that replay had shown to be mistaken.
Torre’s memo read, in part, “This highly inappropriate conduct is detrimental to the game and must stop immediately.”
To which Detroit Tigers manager Brad Ausmus, one of the exiled squabblers, remarked, “I’m still going to react to what I see in front of me.”
Not that you couldn’t see this one coming. Since the league implemented the instant replay rule two seasons ago, whereby managers are allowed one replay challenge per game, and then a second challenge if the first one resulted in an overturned call, teams monitor every pitch and play from a video replay room in the clubhouse. Pitch-track technology allows a consistent view of whether pitches were or weren’t in the strike zone.
Torre, who reminded teams that replay rules are in place to challenge plays and not ball-and-strike calls, fears that games will be unnecessarily delayed and that the integrity of the umpires will be compromised.
The integrity of the umpires had already been impugned a while ago when certain umps, when pressed to justify repeated bad calls, had referenced “their” strike zone, implying in no uncertain terms that they would call a game as they saw fit and not as described by the rules.
Try to imagine the outcry if a National Football League referee justified a questionable call by sourcing “my pass interference,” or a National Hockey League ref citing “my cross checking,” as if rules are subject to individual interpretation and not something to be applied across the board. He would be cordially invited to hit the bricks.
Replay technology should be welcomed with open arms. Had it been in place six years ago, Detroit’s Armando Galarraga would have thrown a perfect game against Cleveland, and umpire Jim Joyce wouldn’t have been reduced to tears upon seeing that his missed call on a play at first with two out in the ninth turned Galarraga’s would-be perfecto into a one-hit shutout.
Surely Don Denkinger would have preferred a replay overturn of his call in Game 6 of the 1985 World Series – one that stands as the Holy Grail of blown calls and wrote Denkinger’s name in umpire infamy.
As for speeding up the game, which is a good idea, Torre could help matters by telling the banana slugs of the replay staff to get a move on. What becomes obvious to everyone else in about 10 of seconds watching a replay can take six or seven minutes for the replay experts to arrive at a conclusion.
The balls-and-strikes issue could be settled by turning it over to the pitch-trackers, which make uniform calls across the board and leave no room for guessing, catcher framing or manager whinging.
Of course, when buying groceries, forget the automated cashier and go to the line with a real checkout clerk, lest more humans get phased out of a paying gig.
But no one would be getting bounced out of an umpiring job. Let the home plate umps listen for foul tips and make calls on plays at the plate. Use the available technology for balls and strikes, and those not liking the calls can knock themselves out yelling at a machine.