quote:
Originally posted by jjk:
Thoughts on was he too close to get the whole picture?
My thoughts are the same as Bruce Weber's
New York Times, June 4, 2010
The Perfect Asterisk
By BRUCE WEBER
The egregious call at first base by the umpire Jim Joyce that cost a Detroit Tigers pitcher, Armando Galarraga, the chance to be only the 21st major-league pitcher to have tossed a perfect game has unleashed consternation on the land. History is denied! Incompetence reigns! Something must be done! Expand instant replay!
Nah.
First of all, history wasn’t denied; it was made. Galarraga’s magnificent performance last Wednesday will always be the perfect game with the asterisk, the one every commentator mentions whenever perfect games are mentioned, the tainted perfect game and thus the most famous perfect game of all time.
Second, Joyce’s bungle — and oh, man, it was a beaut! — has hardly reigned. A sturdy baseball citizen who has served in the big leagues with distinction (which for umpires is to say without) since 1989, he was reduced to tears by the fact of his ill-timed mistake and its being trumpeted on front pages and television broadcasts around the world. You think that’s not being held accountable?
And something must be done? Why? Umpires have been ingrained in major-league baseball since the inception of the National League in 1876, somewhere approaching 200,000 games ago, and it’s likely that the umps have botched a call or two in every one of them since then. Somehow this has not eroded the fan base or undermined the integrity of the competition, which is something that the players and the owners have periodically done.
That reality, in fact, should tell us something about the nature of baseball, which is the least programmatic, the least technological of games. It doesn’t even have a clock. The fields have widely varying shapes and sizes, and the primary battleground between offense and defense — i.e., the strike zone — is a box of air with dimensions that have proven impossible to specify. There is a lot less science in baseball, a lot more art, than in any other sport you can name. (Golf and s****r nuts, just pipe down.) It’s an irony that only in baseball do there exist perfect games.
This is the main reason that so many baseball fans are so gaga over statistics, because the game’s ambiguities create a hunger for measurement, for exactitude where it doesn’t exist, and it’s the main reason that baseball is the most written about, most discussed, most intellectually parsed game there is.
It’s also the main reason that instant replay feels more like an intrusion in baseball than it does in tennis or football or basketball or hockey, each of which has adopted some form of video review to re-evaluate some officials’ calls. But the prime responsibilities of officials in those other sports have always been to recognize infractions and assign blame, and umpires don’t do that. And it’s worth noting that those responsibilities — calling penalties, faults and fouls — are largely unaffected by instant-replay rules.
The role of umpires in baseball is much more integral. They aren’t observers passing judgment on the legality of given actions so much as filters through which the action passes; nothing can happen — a strike, an out, a run scored — without their imprimatur. They have no prime responsibilities, just the responsibility to see and acknowledge everything, which is why the technological usurping of any one of them feels especially sullying.
Besides, instant-replay review isn’t about improving umpiring or improving baseball; it’s about improving television, which more and more controls how the game is administered both on the field and off. The implementation of instant replay last year to assist on tricky home run calls was welcomed by many umpires, and I don’t suppose it has ruined anything. But it tastes funny, and it feels like the first sign of a heartbreak, the first loose thread on a brand-new sweater that is waiting for the inevitable tug.
I know the argument: The world has evolved, technology has evolved, and baseball has evolved. As long as we can get it right, why not get it right? Well, for one thing, we’d never have had the part shocking, part anguishing, part cosmically comic final moments of the imperfect perfect game last week; nor the very poignant aftermath as the participants confronted the consequences and one another; nor the eruption of passion and debate among millions of baseball fans.
Is our pursuit of finality, the properly placed decimal point, the world record sans asterisk, ultimate victory even in the fundamentally inconsequential arena of sport, worth trading in all of that? (While I’m making this point, why do we need a Bowl Championship Series? Isn’t it more fun to argue over who’s No. 1?)
Insist, if you must, that the umpires are a problem. But the problem is so much more interesting than the solution.
