Thursday, May 16, 2013
MLB hoping for large replay expansion in 2014
(sports.yahoo.com)
Read More...Major League Baseball appears set for a vast expansion of video review by umpires in 2014 and is examining whether all calls other than balls or strikes should be subject to instant replay.
Replay has been in place for home run calls since August 2008. Commissioner Bud Selig initially wanted to add trap plays and fair/foul calls down the lines for 2013, but change was put off while more radical options were examined.
‘‘My opinion has evolved,’’ baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said Thursday ...
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1 2 3 >And that call is ridiculous. Guapo, to your point the only ump who would have had an angle is the home plate ump and he may well have been blocked by Hairston.
But really, what a ridiculous call.
As I mentioned in the dugout thread, Rule 9.02c makes it illegal for an umpire to overrule another's decision, unless the umpire making the original call can be prevailed upon to ask for help.
Worst call ever is the call ruining the perfect game last year. This is a stupid call. This is exactly the kind of call that the anti-replay people are prepared to live with and which the pro-replay people will get all worked up about.
I have a compromise decision: More umpires! One on each side of the bag and one suspended on wires above each base. For each call they take a vote and the majority wins. It's foolproof.
I don't know...this is so obviously wrong that it has to rank as one of the worst ever IMO. No, it didn't ruin a perfect game or determine the outcome of a playoff game, but it's just jaw-droppingly terrible.
That said, we're looking at two different phenomena here, I think. Jim Joyce had an incredible brain fart -- so intent, I imagine, on not just calling a guy out to preserve a perfect game that he accidentally called a guy safe to ruin one -- but this dude just wasn't looking at the right spot.
Seems standard.
They'll never over-rule the initial call. They're a union, dummy.
To me it's no different then when your SS boots an easy grounder, or an OF muffs a sure-thing pop-up. Random errors that help you sometimes, and hurt you sometimes, and are just part of the game.
The baseball gods never forget.
At the start of the play, yes- you want to have a 90 degree angle to the bag from where the throw is coming from. When the throw came in wide, he should have angled in towards the plate with the throw. As it was, the throw "straight-lined" his view of the bag, where depth can't be determined. From that angle, he likely saw Helton lined up with the bag and had no perception of how deep he was. Being angled in towards the plate would have shown how far off the bag Helton was.
I forgot about that. It was mind-boggling.
And I think it was McClelland on Tuesday who initially called Jeff Franceour out on a ball that bounced off the top of the fence that the center fielder then caught. I guess it was too much trouble for him to, you know, turn around and watch the ball.
Wasn't he the pine-tar ump? Amazing he's still active.
He's probably trying to take some shots at the Royals, as they're giving away miniature pine tar bats during the current homestand.
Fans think that safe or out are objectively true categories, they exist regardless of what the umpire says. A blown call prevents the truth from being recognized.
Sorry. Actually it took a while to find it because I was sure it was a Yankees-Twins game.
I just watched it again, and while it was a lousy call, it falls into the category described in #15. It was a bang bang play that the ump just got wrong. I don't think this call compares. Helton's foot was literally 1-2 feet from the bag. It's absurd.
Wait, people don't get really upset when those things happen?
It's not a defense. He got it wrong, b/c the 1B blocked his view.
My point is, who cares? Random mistakes happen in baseball every day. An umpire blowing a judgement call is not different than a fielder muffing a 99.99% play.
The idea that there is some platonic ideal of umpiring accuracy that needs to be attained is silly.
Do they carry on about it for days and months? Suggest the player should be "fired" for such a blatant error?
Well that's one way to look at it I guess. For the rest of us the umpire's blown call can be overturned by replay or the umps congregating and getting it right. A fielder muffing a grounder can not, because there's nothing to get right that was wrong. In the former X happened but Y was the result on the field, in the latter X happened and X was the result on the field.
Clearly blown, but not anything like what you recall.
Right, but that's b/c you view the umpiring call as a complete absolute, rather than a continuum, like the fielding play.
On certain batted balls the batter "should be out" 100% of time time, but we require the fielder to actually convert the play anyway, and very occasionally they muff it. Other balls are 50-50.
Same with umpiring calls. Many are 100% calls (that very occasionalyy get muffed), and others are 50-50 calls where there's no right answer.
The mistake, IMHO, is in treating the game as only the interaction between the players, while the umpires are an external force that should be 100% accurate. That's not reality, and it shouldn't be our goal.
To make an analogy, weather impacts games capriciously and often unfairly. Wind, rain, heat, can and do directly change the course of a game. The simplest example being the wind is blowing in hard in the 4th inning and knocks down a sure HR ball to LF for team A, but in the 7th inning it's not blowing, and team B hits a "just-barely" HR to the same field.
We don't look to use technology to "wind-adjust" and find out if a ball was a "true HR". The umpires are like the weather; an integral part of the game, subject to the same random crap.
That said I tend to be on snapper's side of this and find the wailing about missed calls a bit much at times. What frustrates me is not the lack of replay, it's the lack of accountability. This umpire could make similarly awful calls on a regular basis and still be an ump for the next 35 years.
If I were the God of MLB and able to implement whatever I wanted one thing I would have is an independent review system for each call accounting for difficulty and accuracy. Each umpire would be graded with the best getting plum assignments (ASG, post-season) and the worst being held accountable in degrees ranging from formal warnings, in season suspensions and ultimately demotion or termination. I think if such a system existed and was transparent and public the calls for replay would be lessened.
Post #16 is spot on. He ended up out of position because of the way the throw came in, and he likely could not see at all that Helton was not on the bag.
It was the only explanation that made any sense anyway, given how far off Helton was.
If I were the God of MLB and able to implement whatever I wanted one thing I would have is an independent review system for each call accounting for difficulty and accuracy. Each umpire would be graded with the best getting plum assignments (ASG, post-season) and the worst being held accountable in degrees ranging from formal warnings, in season suspensions and ultimately demotion or termination. I think if such a system existed and was transparent and public the calls for replay would be lessened.
That makes a lot of sense. An umpire having a consistently FUBAR strike-zone is far worse to me than an occasional botched call.
I'd use post-hoc video analysis to compel umpires to call the rule-book strikezone, long before I introduced more replay to the game.
When it's close, I get it. This isn't close. If the umpire's judgement is that flawed he should be fired immediately.
McClelland was also the plate ump that called Matt Holliday safe in game 163 vs. the Padres. And the Padre catcher's comments after the game (I forget who it was) shows you just how highly players think of him. Something on the order of "I would never even think of questioning him. If Tim McClelland says he touched the plate, he touched the plate." I always thought that was a very classy thing to say.
It's close b/c he was blocked. The ump didn't see the gap, and ignore it, he couldn't see it.
Yes, being out of position is a mistake, and if an umpire is consistently out of position, he should be disciplined, and maybe fired. But as a one off, it's a non-event.
What your saying is like saying every hitter that swings at a pitch in the dirt should be sent to AAA.
It reeks of arrogance. Incompetent arrogance is a truly awful thing.
these guys are very well compensated and perform a job that a large portion of American men would love to do. For ####'s sake, try not to act as if you are above reproach.
A more apt comparison would be a hitter swinging at a pitch over his head and then refusing to run to first on the wild pitch because he's above that.
I have no problem if he would have appealed. It should have been ####### obvious to him he was out of position. Why didn't he ask the home plate ump for help?
I do not see how you can possibly defend this.
That's a terrible analogy. The weather can't be wrong. It can be unfair, it can be inconsistent, but it can't be wrong. A fielder botching a ball can't be wrong either. The umpires can be, and call in question was just plain wrong. Let's get it right. There's no reason not to other than "because that's the way we've been doing it all along."
Exactly. He had the ability to fix this in his power. He chose not to. Why? What possible harm is there in asking one of his peers to confirm he really didn't #### things up.
Again, this guy is supposed to be one of the best at his craft (we've all see numbers about how it is more difficult to make the majors as an ump than as a player). He should have known that his angle was incorrect and he was prone to miss the foot actually touching the bag. His true incompetence is that he didn't appeal.
I have no problem if he would have appealed. It should have been ####### obvious to him he was out of position. Why didn't he ask the home plate ump for help?
I do not see how you can possibly defend this.
I'm not defending the call. Discipline the umps all you want if they do a bad job.
What I'm saying is these random bad calls don't require us to muck up the game with replay. People take this #### way too seriously.
Players, coaches and managers argue a great many calls. That the team that was on the wrong end of a call is pissed off is not proof or even a hint that a call might be wrong. If he felt like he had a good look at it there would be no reason for him to ask for help.
I'm not sure how this play could have generated this sort of call with the ump not realizing "geez, I got a little screened there" but the idea that people arguing is proof that the call might be wrong is incorrect.
You can't get everything right. Sometimes there is no "right". And balls and strikes is a miasma.
Why fix a bad call at 1B that puts a runner on, but not a ball-four that clearly caught the plate?
I'm arguing that "getting it right" just doesn't matter much. Random umpire mistakes are no more important than random weather effects. Live with it.
It makes for great water-cooler talk anyway. Armando Galarraga is much more famous than if the call had been gotten right.
Did he ask any of the other umpires for help?
There HAS to be a mechanism for righting egregious errors. If they cannot make it happen on the field then replay is the best bet. I personally hate replay, but it much better than simply brushing off blatant officiating errors as part of the game.
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