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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.
Why does there have to be? Baseball has done fine for 100+ years w/o it?
How many of those 100+ years occurred when technology allowed for corrections? How many other major sports have implemented a system to fix these types of issues? How has baseball popularity been trending in the past half-century?
Look, just because you are fine with it doesn't mean the general public is. I am outraged and I don't even give a crap about either team.
If baseball wants to put its head in the sand to bend over for an arrogant union so be it.
One more thing; the argument of "because it's always been this way" is pretty silly. At one point, baseball players didn't wear helmets and spitballs were allowed. Times change and sports must change with them.
So we shouldn't try?
I agree. My argument is that I LIKE the human element and I hate hate hate waiting for replay.
This drives me nuts. I think adding an umpire on the outfield foul lines is spectacularly dumb. These guys spend their entire lives making fair/foul calls from the 1st/3rd base positions then we tell them "OK, in the biggest games of the year we want you to do something different."
It's the umpiring equivalent of shifting Derek Jeter to centerfield for game one of the World Series. It's not that he can't do it but you are probably setting yourself up for some disappointment. The angles, the views they get, they're all different down the line than what they are used to. Don't change it, just go with four umps.
Are you okay with a manager coming out to argue the blatant missed call for the next 4 minutes?
The angles, the views they get, they're all different down the line than what they are used to.
It's not like they are calling balls/strikes while standing off to the side.
Looking down a well-delineated line and determining whether the ball landed fair/foul shouldn't be too much of a stretch from what they currently do. It's not like the line is now CURVED, compared to STRAIGHT during the regular season.
I certainly don't want to sit through countless stupid slo-mo replays. If I wanted to watch something that lame, I'd watch football.
This is the main reason I don't want instant replay. Part of reason that I love sports is the excitement of the moment. It is incredibly exciting to see, for instance, a double play to get out of a bases loaded, one out jam. It will be much less exciting if you have to wait to see if the runner was actually out. It's similar to this in football. When I see my team recover a debatable fumble (for instance), the first reaction isn't pure excitement. It is, "I hope that the review shows it was a fumble." That being said, I do understand the appeal of wanting to get every call right. I just don't see that outweighing the negatives, in my opinion.
No but it IS different and it does seem to cause problems. Just in the last decade and a half we've had several calls on HR/non-HR or fair/foul that were badly missed. Jeffrey Maier, Bellhorn's homer in 2004 (overturned by infield umps), Joe Mauer...that's just off the top of my head. It's not a lot of calls but given how rare these plays require close scrutiny it seems like a high percentage of these calls have gotten missed.
Put another way, I'm sure as hell not seeing any benefit from these LF/RF umps.
I'd understand the desire for replay if I were certain that replay could get every call right. But replay just gets things a little righter. And the only current way to improve the accuracy of replay is to give longer and better looks from the replay judge (which lengthens the delay, and still can't guarantee the call will be right).
This times 1000. The, did what I saw happen really happen, sucks a ton of joy out of football for me.
That replay delay of the sideline catch on the last Giant drive of the SuperBowl was excruciating. You want to celebrate like crazy when the catch is made, but you're stuck hanging to see if the ref will screw the pooch on replay. The Calvin Johnson bizarro non-TD is the worst of the worst to me; use replay to misinterpret the rules and disallow a clear TD.
It's the consistently bad umps (e.g. strike zone abhorrence, puffed-up me me me guys, fat #### Joe West) that get me.
Definitely agree. Particularly, they should force the umps to call a rule-book strikezone, or find another line of work.
Bill Buckner and Leon Durham say hi.
Though I mostly agree with you. I think asking for help should be more common, especially when some fluky thing gets an ump out of position (and he knows it). I think umps should maybe have a signal to each other that, "hey, dude, you missed that pretty badly". But there is no way to make it perfect. Replay would have corrected this one, of course, but it won't get all of them and it will suck up time like crazy.
Imagine this play with replay: network goes to commercial, replay overturns call, after two minutes of commercials, everyone retakes the field, first pitch pop up to short, go to commercial. Whee.
They SHOULD be able to discipline and fire umps who are consistently bad. They should fire the worst three ranked umps every year and bring up new guys. But to fire someone over one (or a few) calls like this would not just be silly but harmful.
Especially since McClelland is by all accounts an excellent ump, and he's had TWO of these head-scratchers.
Especially since McClelland is by all accounts an excellent ump, and he's had TWO of these head-scratchers.
Smart, talented people screw up all the time. It's dangerous to pretend otherwise.
Understanding that is critical to being a good manager, in any field.
And to all of the people that say they don't want to sit through replays, how is that different than sitting there watching the manager yell at the ump? AT least the replays might fix a wrong. The manager arguing never does.
Then managers potentially yell at umps on every play, since anything worthy of a replay is also worthy of a manager yelling at a ump. Hell, they yell at them for stuff not worthy of a replay, so the manager yelling at an ump might more liable to happen than a replay is.
(The same question would apply on any close play -- you can't watch both.)
Edit: "As They See 'Em" was a very good and interesting book.
Anyhow, baseball arguments are fun. Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are. But umps should convene on questioned calls more often.
Close plays at first are typically done by sound, the sound of the ball hitting the mit vs the foot hitting the bag. He probably sounded out at least.
Edit: Or what Benji said.
No way. That Dodgers-Rockies game was plenty enough awesome on it's own merits, instead all the focus is on this one call. It's not helping. I don't find the 'an occasional blown call enhances the game' argument very persuasive. Everyone is standing around while Mattingly is arguing, everyone can see he was safe, why not just make him safe? Is the slope really that slippery?
The only thing to discuss in these situations where no one can say the ump got it right is "why doesn't baseball come out of the stone age on this," and that's not a particularly fun topic of discussion.
After hearing it for four years now, I'm ready to declare this argument weaksauce. It doesn't happen as much as replay would, and even then it is very, very rarely for four minutes.
After the first pitch to the next batter, the first base umpire gives an emphatic (yet belated) safe sign. I think perhaps the first base coach told him what had happened.
The average NFL replay takes 2:27, NHL doesn't take longer than that.
Edit: Or what Benji said.
I think you're missing the point of the question. You're saying he was listening for the ball. So what was he looking at? Not the bag...
My solution: there are no coach's challenges. A 5th umpire (this will please the union, and they need a meaty bone in order to consider admitting their fallibility - a great place for the corpulent veteran umps) sits somewhere else in the stadium with his televisions. The regular on-field umpires have specific instructions to allow the game to unfold at a regular pace - no slowing things down in order to give the 5th ump time to check things out. The 5th umpire has specific instructions to only pause play when it is immediately obvious that an error has been made. After that, he can take a look and review. There is no such thing as "let's just take a close look and make sure," which is what can ruin the momentum of a tight NFL finish. The managers have no access to this ump, cannot see him at all, and are aware that argument will do nothing. Balls and strikes are not reviewable.
With this plan, delays will only occur when an actual error was made. The one issue is that you will get some gamesmanship immediately after a controversial play, with one team trying to hurry things up, and the other trying to slow things down, as they do during rain in the 4th inning. It won't overturn every botched call, but it will get almost all of the big ones.
Not grasping your point.
a great place for the corpulent veteran umps
At the start of the replay initiative, they put Froemming and a few other older supervisors with us to oversee what was going on and make sure nothing weird happened - I'm not sure if it has remained that way as far as always having the ump supervisor around to make sure everything's kosher. They were almost corpulent to a man. And sometimes rather sleepy. Steve Palermo was pretty awesomely grumpy about other umpires, you all would really like him.
That the "four minutes" notion tossed around in this thread is way off. NFL replays seemingly take forever and they're only 2 and change. Non balls and strikes replays in baseball would be much more black and white and should take even less time.
You want to get the umps to make better calls? Make them do press interviews after games, don't make it an automatic ejection for arguing balls and strikes. Take away the ump's discretion as the ultimate arbitrator of the game if they can't handle it.
Also, the argument that it'll take too long doesn't jive either. The current method to decide disputed calls outside of homeruns is that all of the umpires get together and discuss the play, which can take minutes. You want to speed up the game, get rid of the automatic 2:30 minutes of ad time between innings, make umps carry tablets with direct feeds of the game, and replays, and stop letting umps believe they can get away it.
Reading Bill James's NHB about the 1880s and 1890s is informative. Umps used to take physical abuse during games and the rules that were implemented to protect them were absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, all that protection turned them into a bunch of self-righteous bastards because now they cane make insane calls without any consequence.
They are right to guard their independence. HOWEVER, they should also be much more open to conferring on plays and less insistent that the call they made was absolutely the right call. There's no reason that they can't get together to see if another ump saw something different.
"Should" is a very big word. Even technology isn't magic, yet. Things will still take extra time and I repeat, personally I just like the human element. I can accept that many don't.
You want to speed up the game, get rid of the automatic 2:30 minutes of ad time between innings
Having the game umpired by magic unicorn ponies is more likely than taking away advertising time, so it's hard to take this suggestion seriously.
Of course. But compared to the NFL, there isn't as much to process in a baseball review. It's more like hockey, which is pretty cut and dry.
What makes you think replays would happen all that often?
If a manager doesn't think it's important enough to argue about, what makes a replay a necessity?
Even if MLB didn't adopt the "red flag" option for requesting replays (which would put a hard cap on replays), and simply went to an extra umpire in a replay booth (who can communicate with the home plate umpire), on a play like this (or fair/foul calls, or tag/no tag) it wouldn't take more than one or two looks to see the proper result.
How long would that take, 30 seconds? A quick buzz down to the home plate umpire if the call was incorrect (and within the parameters of what can be reviewed) and we're done.
My only explanations are that he either 1) is too proud/confident/arrogant to admit he might have missed the call or 2) he was unaware he was out of position.
Anyone have another plausible explanation? If not, that's pretty damming, IMO.
The protocol has to change. If another ump gets a better look, there's got to be an easy way to signal to the offending umpire that a conference is needed. The trigger can't be the opposing team, because you can't expect umps to differentiate between legitimate griping and run-of-the-mill, I want that call to go my way griping (and it would only encourage more griping). But good Lord, whatever minimal embarrassment you might feel if a fellow ump alerts you to your mistake has got to be infinitely better than the day or day-plus scorn from everywhere when you blow a call like this.
I have to think that, right now, Welke wishes the home plate ump had called his screw-up to his attention.
What's ironic about this situation is that the bang-bang play at first is the best proof that most umpires are really really good at their jobs, as opposed to the miserable strike zone calls that prove that most umpires really really don't care enough to do a good job. Take the balls and strikes call away from the home plate ump and have a machine do it -- that'll send the right message, and perhaps straighten out the entire sorry profession.
That's all fine, except what you've said here isn't happening as far as an A ---> B. I'm the one who posted the damned article, and I'm not coming to Welke's defense at all.
Umpires are a necessary evil that in a perfect world would not exist in any sport.
Perfection is boring.
I think you're putting way too much weight on perfection in an entertainment pursuit.
As Lassus says, if every strike-zone were perfect, and every call 100%, it would be a far more boring gaming.
So what do you do when the other ump thinks he has a better look but is actually wrong?
Simply including more humans won't help.
I do like the idea of a "replay" ump. Add a fifth member of the crew who would watch a set of screens. If he sees something obvious and reversible he alerts the crew chief immediately. If it isn't so obvious that it takes 2 or 3 minutes of careful scrutiny of the video, screw it, call stands.
I hate the idea of team initiated appeals.
The only exception to all of this would be balls/strikes which seem like they could be automated. If they could, I'd do it.
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