How many times have you seen your favorite sports teams
victimized by the faulty decisions of umpires, referees or other officials?
For most passionate fans, the answer is: Too often!
In 2018, I began researching controversial calls
made by umpires in major league baseball. Within a couple of months, I had
gathered enough material to fill an entire book. Though I initially set out to
discredit baseball’s men in blue, I came to sympathize with them by the time I had
finished the project. The book—my first non-fiction work since 2017—is now available
through McFarland Publishing. Though I got a little flippant with the title, don’t let that
fool you. I have the utmost respect for umpires. And I certainly wouldn’t want to
trade jobs with them.
The
Umpire Was Blind! contains more than fifty game accounts spanning
well over a century of baseball history. From the infamous “Merkle Game” in
1908 to Bill Miller’s bizarre strike zone in Game 5 of the 2017 World Series,
the most heavily debated performances by umpires are explored in great depth. The
following excerpt will give you a good idea of the mindset I had adopted by the
time I finished writing it.
...With offense on the decline and
strikeouts dramatically on the rise in the majors, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred
made an arrangement with the independent Atlantic League to implement various
experimental changes. In addition to moving the pitching rubber back from its standard
sixty-feet, six-inch placement, Atlantic League president Rick White agreed to
begin using “robot umpires” during the 2019 season.
The so-called “robo-umps” don’t look anything
like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in the Terminator movies. The technology is actually known as TrackMan.
It’s a 3D Doppler radar system that precisely measures the location, trajectory
and spin rate of hit and pitched baseballs. The device can be precisely aligned
to the strike zone to determine balls and strikes. Most major league parks
already have the devices in place, though they have mostly been used for
coaching and scouting purposes.
After
a series of questionable calls in the 2019 World Series, Manfred announced that
the electronic strike zone would be used on an experimental basis in selected minor
league ballparks during the 2020 campaign. In particular, the Class-A Florida
State League was mentioned as a possible setting. The MLB Umpires Association
officially agreed to cooperate with the development and testing of the
technology in conjunction with a new five-year labor contract.
No
matter how the experiment turns out, the fact of the matter is that home plate umpires
(in some capacity) are likely here to stay. And it’s difficult not to
sympathize with them given the demanding nature of their jobs. According to
retired American League arbiter Nestor Chylak, officials are expected to “be
perfect on the first day of the season and then get better every day.” Adhering
to an extremely convoluted rulebook, they make hair-trigger decisions knowing
that their calls will affect the fortunes of the players and teams involved. They
are among the most vilified figures in all of sports. Many of the insults
hurled at them have become clichés. A few of the more charitable ones are as
follows:
--You
drop more calls than AT&T!
--I
thought only horses slept standing up!
--Flip
over the plate and read the directions!
--Is
your rulebook written in Braille?!
Despite
their imperfections, umpires have played a vital role in the game’s history.
Former major league commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti described the public perception
of umpires in figurative terms: “Baseball fits America well because it
expresses our longing for the rule of law while licensing our resentment of law
givers.” That resentment has flourished for a very long time…
I hope potential readers will find the subject
matter as intriguing as I did.
As we continue to hold umpires in contempt for their
flawed decisions, we must also realize that baseball is an extremely complicated
game. And the men who preside over it are only human.
Giants pitching great Christy Mathewson once said: “Many
baseball fans look upon an umpire as a sort of necessary evil to the luxury of
baseball, like the odor that follows an automobile.”
As it turns out, that odor is less offensive depending
on the vehicle.
