Wednesday, October 18, 2017

After Further Review...

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He was safe. Play ball!
In general, I am a huge proponent of using HiDef imagery, powerful lenses and super SloMo to help referees and umpires in professional sports do their jobs. For too many years, we were forced to accept outcomes we could see with our own eyes were wrong. We struggled to accept the 'human factor' as part of a game, even as the technology existed to remove that human factor from the game. "Get it right", we said. The game will be better for it.

And the game IS better for it. They do "get it right", and most of the more egregiously bad calls are overturned in the name of fairness and accuracy. But like any improvement to any established process, there can be - and usually are - unintended consequences that simply could not be foreseen when the technological solution was implemented.

The biggest mistake we could possibly make when adding an additional layer of technology to determine the fairest, most accurate adjudications are made, would be to slavishly accept the micro level of accuracy while ignoring the macro sense of the game itself.  We saw this play out in a painful call in the eighth inning of the final Washington/Chicago playoff game. Essentially, the catcher fired a pickoff attempt to first and the runner got back safely. But wait! After the implementation of replay in the MLB, the players are taught to keep the tag applied to the runner. That way, if the runner loses contact with the base - even for a millisecond - he will be called out. And sure enough, the infielder held the ball in contact with the runner, whose foot came half an inch off the base for less than a second, and that's all it took to end the playoff hopes for the Washington Nationals.

Before replay, once the runner was safe, the infielder threw the ball back to the pitcher and never worried about the possibility of the runner briefly losing physical contact with the base. This was just common sense: The runner was safe, the play was over, let's go, play ball! But the replay regime has completely legislated common sense out of the process. It's as if they've created a kind of 'Shroedinger's Baserunner' who is simultaneously safe AND out, the final determination to be made once the play is examined through the lens of technology for an arbitrarily long period of time after it is over.

Nobody ever thought about what happens five or ten or even twenty seconds after the play is made and called. Because that's not what we're here to do. We're watching two teams play a beautiful, elegant, hundred year old game at the highest level. We do not want to see games decided by a pointless call based on an unintended consequence of what otherwise was an improvement in the game.

I'm very much for using sensors to call balls and strikes. The problem isn't just missing calls - although that IS a problem - the problem is that every umpire has his own strike zone, very few of which are even close to the strike zone described in the rulebook. But I'd also like to see the League step up and figure out a way to keep the improvements to the quality of the game delivered by replay, but to put an end to the absurd, pointless nitpickery that has resulted from it.
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