Let's hold hands and pray. Someday soon, when Bud Selig finally is removed from the commissioner's chair like a rotting tree, we can only hope his successor realizes October is waning. Pro and college football continue to tickle the American consciousness on every demographic level -- male and female, old and young, reality and fantasy -- and reduce our national past-its-time to secondary programming. And when we do see gripping story lines develop, from a possible Yankees-vs.-Joe Torre matchup in the World Series to the Angels and the inspiration they draw from the late Nick Adenhart, what gets in the way?
Wretched umpiring.
A day barely passes without another missed call influencing a playoff series and renewing widespread pleas for expanded instant replay. Just when we were recovering from the Phil Cuzzi gaffe in New York, where a ball that was fair by several inches was called foul and led to a national referendum on why six umps can't get a play right, we now have an even lamer sequence that had direct impact in determining a series winner. Late Sunday night in Denver, in weather more conducive to the Iditarod, Philadelphia's Chase Utley checked his swing in the ninth inning and fouled a ball off his right knee in the batter's box. Except the plate ump, Jerry Meals, didn't see the ball hit Utley and let the play resume. Unlike the preponderance of umpiring mistakes in recent days, this situation wasn't confined to one screw-up. As Utley advanced down the line, he was thrown out by Rockies closer Huston Street -- a replay confirms that first baseman Todd Helton dragged his leg across the bag for the out -- but first-base ump Ron Kulpa called Utley safe. You know the rest: Jimmy Rollins scored the winning run on a Ryan Howard sacrifice fly in a 6-5 victory, and when the Rockies blew a two-run lead in the ninth Monday evening and lost their National League divisional scrum to the Phillies, some might say this series was lost the previous game by two clueless umps.
A day barely passes without another missed call influencing a playoff series and renewing widespread pleas for expanded instant replay.
"Yeah, the ball came up and grazed off his leg and continued rolling up the line," Meals told the Associated Press after viewing a replay. "No. 1, it wasn't seen by myself or anybody. If you look at it, you'll be able to see it. Off the front leg, got him up in the knee-thigh area. It just grazed him and the ball continued to roll the way it was rolling. I just saw a ball hit and rolling out there and that's it. Utley took off like it was nothing. He gave no indication to us that it hit him. Whatever percent of the time, you're going to get a guy that's going to stop if it hits him."
Uh, not when you're a clever gamer like Utley and trying to win a playoff series. How dare this umpire try to blame Utley for his own oversight. "The ball might have caught me," said the Phillies second baseman, playing coy a day later. "Nobody said anything, so I ran hard. I check swung. The ball checked up in front of me. It might have hit my leg. But nobody made a call."
"Chase probably felt it but he said, 'Hey, I'm going to take off, nobody is saying anything,' " said Shane Victorino, Utley's teammate. "And it turned into a pivotal play in the game."
If not the entire 2009 postseason, which finds the Phillies trying to make history as the first NL team to repeat as World Series champions since the 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds.
So when history is being altered by human error, isn't it the ultimate no-brainer to expand replay? At the moment, videos are reviewed only on potential home-run calls, but as long as MLB is adopting technology for its slow and backward sport, Selig and the old farts should immediately extend replay -- preferably before the two League Championship Series, but more realistically for next season -- to include fair/foul calls and even tag plays. It's not healthy for the sport's future when playoff drama is haunted by perpetual anxiety over the next umpiring blunder. If baseball wants high credibility, not the current crudibility, Selig and his men will act swiftly for a change and recognize their crisis at hand. Even Phillies manager Charlie Manuel, a purist who fought the concept of replay when it was implemented last year, now thinks it needs to involve more than debatable home run calls.
"I mean, they've been missing calls ever since baseball has been 100-something-years-old or whatever. They've been missing them that long," Manuel said. "But at the same time, if they want to get them right, then getting it right is getting them right."
Thank you, Yogi Berra. No matter how he voices his concerns, he's correct. So is Torre, the Dodgers manager, who is more eloquent in his pro-replay argument. "The fair-foul thing I think could be expanded. For plays where maybe umpires are blocked out, they're human," he said. "Am I saying they're making more wrong calls now than they did years and years ago? I think we have more ways to scrutinize and look at it now than we did then, so I can't say that. In terms of where [an umpire] may be blocked by the call, something like that it may be the future."
Replay works in the NFL in a wide assortment of ways. Replay works in the NBA, which expanded it recently to include shot-clock situations and, in the final two minutes of regulation and overtime, which player touches the ball before it goes out of bounds. Replay works in the NHL. It works in tennis. And it would work in expanded form in baseball, a sport that has clung too long to a traditional refrain that human beings make mistakes. "I think the first thing I ever said was that the absence of replays would not bother me. I've been around too long," said Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, whose team wasn't burned by anything but its own ineptness in being swept by the Dodgers. "Part of the game is umpires making their best calls. I mean, you watch us play, you watch me manage, nobody's perfect."Look, it's 2009, gentlemen. Getting plays right in the computer age is much more sensible, progressive and responsible. Very simply, you position another umpire/league observer in the press box with a high-definition, big-screen TV in front of him -- hopefully, someone fairly young with sharp vision -- and have him buzz down to the crew chief when it's obvious on replay that Cuzzi misses a play. Or Meals and Kulpa miss their plays. It needn't be a long, time-consuming ordeal. As quickly as a viewer sees a mistake on a replay, the man in the booth can inspect the same video and react instantly. Agree to place TVs in both dugouts so managers can view the same plays and don't feel the need to spend five minutes arguing. The last thing I want to do, as one bothered by the dreadful length of games and post-midnight finishes, is turn replay into an agonizing exercise. Twins manager Ron Gardenhire, who was victimized by Cuzzi's call but also benefited in the divisional tiebreaker game when umpires didn't see when Detroit's Brandon Inge was grazed by a pitch, wants to wave a red flag. That won't work.
"I didn't see the [Cuzzi] play, so I would have had to have coaches up in the booth calling into my ear on my headset," Gardenhire said. "Give me a headset and give me a red flag and we can fix this stuff, but I would have to have somebody calling me saying, 'Throw your flag, let's question this call. If you use it and you're wrong, you don't get to use it the rest of the game. If you use it and you're right, you get your red flag back, and that would save a lot of money [for ejections]."
In total disagreement is Yankees manager Joe Girardi, whose team might be good enough this postseason to overcome any umpiring mess. "That might be dangerous with that red flag. I just think it really breaks the rhythm of the game," he said. "You know, during the course of the year, everything is going to balance out. In the playoffs, it's different, and how many red flags would you be allowed to throw? The rhythm is important to your pitchers, and I just think it would really hurt that."
I propose a compromise: One man in the booth, one minute to make a complete judgment, one minute for the crew chief to make a correction. Now how hard is that, people?The Cuzzi scenario revealed a problem with umpires down the left- and right-field lines, the fifth and sixth men in an expanded postseason rotation that started in 1947. "We're not used to playing that far down the line," Cuzzi told the Newark Star-Ledger, his hometown paper in a state across the Hudson River from Yankee Stadium. "The instant the ball is hit, we usually start running. I think I may have been looking too closely at it. I never had a feel for where the left fielder was on the play. There is no excuse. I missed the play. It's a terrible feeling. As badly as many people on that field may have felt [Friday], I don't think any of them had a worse night's sleep than I did."
Funny how we never heard umps complaining about monitoring the postseason foul lines in the '90s, '80s, '70s and '60s. "The challenges in working the foul line: No. 1 is we don't do it a lot. It's a tough one to practice," said Tim Tschida, chief of the crew on the night Cuzzi erred. "Your first movement is always to get out of the way because we're not accustomed to having fielders come from the side."
Fellas, that's why you make the medium-sized bucks. Deal with it, have seminars, do simulated situations, whatever it takes to get the calls right. Or get out of the business. Too much is at stake.
When asked about expanding replay by FOXSports.com's Ken Rosenthal, Selig offered up one of his pseudo-intellectual, no-action responses. "Baseball is not the kind of game that can have interminable delays," he said. As usual, Bud Light is dismissing something out of hand instead of looking into it, just like steroids in the mid-'90s. I hope the owners urge him to join the 21st century, with the rest of us, and rectify the latest problem ravaging his slowly dying game.
It's October. We're supposed to be having fun.
We're not.
Comments (Page 1 of 2)
I agree with you completely, Mariotti. There should be an increase in the replay system. It IS 2009. We DO have the technology. It does not have to be a big, time-consuming thing, as you suggest. There can be ways that will expedite the system.
The red flag system isn't a great idea. Just be committed to having all plays called as well as possible. That doesn't have to take a lot of time.
A part of the problem, I think, is that not everyone wants to see the plays always called correctly. They like that there are discrepancies (hopefully in their favor).
Good article, Mariotti.
How do you save a game that has no salary cap. The Yankees can go out and spend 1/2 a billion dollars in contracts in the off season to buy a World Series.
If the Yankees had Tampa Bay's payroll they could only afford to put two players on the field.
Over $200,000,000.00 in payroll a year. Sad.
Oh sure Jay, the Cuzzi blown call could have been reversed because it was a fair ball that bounced in to the stands. Ground Rule double. But Earth to Mariotti, there are blown calls that simply cannot be reversed. Let's assume Jay, that Minnesota had the bases loaded when Cuzzi blew that call. How much of it would you suggest they reverse? Better yet, what if the ball had stayed on the field and Minnesota had the bases loaded at the time? Obviously, that isn't what happened, but it just as easily could have happened that way. Are the umpires then gonna have to figure out how many runners would have scored if they hadn't screwed up? Its a no win situation.
The perfect, as they say, should not be the enemy of the good. The fact that there are calls that would be inconvenient at best, and impossible at worst, to subject to instant replay should not mean that NO call should be subject to instant replay. In other words, improve the game where you can.
As to instant replay's interfering with the "tempo" of the game--what tempo? You mean about twenty seconds of action spread over about three hours of crotch-scratching, sunflower-seed-spitting, mound conferences, fidgeting in the batter's box, shaking off pitches and telephone calls (yes, telephone calls) to the bullpen?
As to umpires' mistakes "evening themselves out" over time, that doesn't really help a team trying to come from behind in a five-game series, does it?
If baseball purists want to protect the game, they ought to start with the AL getting rid of the DH. Either that, or go whole hog like football and platoon offense and defense: eight Ozzie Smiths and one Nolan Ryan in the field, and a batting order of nine Manny Ramirezes.
The game is played with 18 players, of whom few are better than 60% wrong mos of the time. Even if the 4 umpires made 30% of the calls wrong, they are still 70% better than the players. Come October, I'd rather see a game of 8 umpires, 4 on a team, calling a computer aided scenerios, and see which team wins.
Canoefoot
Baseball has always been a game with human beings, which includes their personalities, styles,different approaches, heroics and occasional errors. Umpire mistakes have always been part of the game. Part of winning is the attitude to overcome those bumps in the road. Girardi is correct: there is a rhythm to the game and errors do even out over time. I know the younger generation wants to have high tech everywhere. For me, there are times when it's an imposition. Perhaps someday we can get rid of umpires. We can have little "beeps" around the strike zone instead, like they do in tennis. Think of this: if there had been instant replay at the time Jackie Robinson would have been called "Out" when he stole Home.
Comparing football and baseball is apples and oranges Jay. There are so many delays in football, review of plays doesn't disrupt the game appreciably, but a 5 or ten minute delay of a baseball game is huge in terms of the tempo of the game. There is no point in what ifs, missed calls are part of the game. If you want perfection do away with umpires altogether and use technology to replace them. It is certainly possible. The game would lose a lot interest for me, though.
Mr. Marrotti,
When you can say you never make a mistake on your job, such as a typographical error, then I will advocate getting rid of umpires. On the big stage, mistakes are made by all. It is more exciting to see how people react to adversity and rise to the occasion!!
Good article. The fact that umpiring errors are becoming more of a factor in the outcome of the game is a huge problem. Umpires are human and they miss things, but the inconsistency is the greater issue. A check swing cannot be considered a perception. It either is or it isn't, and the umpires must ALL have the same understanding and equal means of measure for determining this. Guys have struck out who clearly held up while others have walked who obviously could not. Finally, Chase Utley is not clever. He's a cheater. He took advantage of the fact that everyone else missed it in an effort to advantage his team. I guess the next time I'm in the grocery store, it will be okay for me to steal some food to avantage my family. Apparently it's okay as long as nobody notices
You may not be having fun, Mariotti. I am. The definition of baseball for me is "fun".
As for instant replays, I have always been opposed to them, but just like the eroding level of skill in the second echelon of players due to twice as many teams (and some of the best athletes doing other sports), the umpiring is not what it used to be. So I wouldn't be opposed to some reasonable replay policy - reasonable being not more than two or three per game.
OK, so the Cuzzi call was blown, no question. The real jist of Mariotti's article is his not-too-subtle jabs at the game of baseball. Listen Jay, baseball is still the most popular sport in America. the reason is that people watch it because they love it, not because they have placed bets on it and want to see how they did in this weeks office pool. The NFL (and NCAA) lend themselves to betting. That's why every pre-game show and every radio talking head spends hours on injuries and the SPREAD. Get real, baseball draws over 70 million people a year because they love the game. To say the sport is dying is innacurate, insane and incredibly stupid. Just imagine what the tv ratings and attendance figures would be if the Yankees or any MLB team only played 16 games a year! The Yankees, or Red Sox, or Dodgers, or any team could draw 150,000 a game. There wouldn't be a stadium big enough to hold them all.
Right on, Mariotti! Great article. One question: if an ump blows more than one call in a game, should he be replaced before the next game (assuming there is one)?
I dont ever remember so many bad or missed calls. Maybe the problem isnt needed replay maybe we need better umpires.
THE FIRST THING HE CAN DO IS FIRE HIMSELF. THAT'S THE WORST LEADER WE HAVE IN ANY OF THE FOUR MAIN SPORTS IN THIS COUNTRY. bUD IS GOT TO BE ONE OF THE WORST OF ALL TIME. wHY DON'T WE SHORTEN THE GAMES TO SEVEN INNGINGS AND THEN LET REPLAY HAVE A MORE PRONINATE ROLE.
Come on folks, they can get the replay system to work just as they did in football. Try it in the exhibition season to take out the bugs then implement it in the regular season, Some plays will not be reviewable just as they are in football but I think it will work and games will be less likely to be determined by a bad call. I'm sure the great baseball minds will be able to come up with a plan that can improve the game. Baseball is filled with a great many stubborn traditional thinkers. Look at the DH and why has it not in both leagues by now! Let's go Baseball, the future is NOW!
FIRE HIMSELF AND PUT PETE ROSE IN THE HALL.
As a die hard baseball fan, my biggest gripe is the long playoff situation. I wish it was a best of 3 series, then the typical World Series format.
I'm old school but a re-play during the World Series may be ok.
A salary cap would be nice also, a little unfair to small markets.
NICE ARTICLE JAY, BUT YOU'RE STILL GAY AND LOVING TONY R... SUCH A TERRIBLE THING AND SOMETHING GOD DIDN'T INCLUDE IN HIS THOUGHTS FOR OUR WORLD..(GAYNESS).. I WATCH AROUND THE HORN MAINLY TO SEE THE WAY YOU TREAT WOODY. WE ALL KNOW WOODY IS AS STRAIGHT AS THEY COME AND TONY ALWAYS USES HIS LITTLE "POINT GUN" MORE WHEN YOU'RE TALKING THAN WHEN WOODY IS AND HE'S ALWAYS HITTING THE MUTE BUTTON ON EVERYONE BUT YOU.. I THINK YOU'RE A GREAT COLUMNIST BUT JUST CAN'T STOMACH YOUR MUG!!!! AND OMG, THOSE LIPS... WHOA!!!!
Ladies and gentlemen,
How can one stand to have this discussion when tema splay 30 games in the exhibition perios, another 160 games during the regular season and potentially another 19 more games in the postseason. The total of 209 games a year per team is to long and too many possible blown calls. The solution...end the regular season at the end of August and finish the season at the END OF SUMMER!
If instant replay is allowed, then ya better find somewhere else to take time off of the length of the game, cause it is getting a little bit too long. Start with batters calling time out, or the catcher going out to the mound to whisper sweet nothings into the pitchers ear.