Maybe The Worst Call Ever

This is why Major League Baseball has to step into the 20th century (let alone the 21st) and start using instant replay on controversial plays.



I consider myself a big baseball fan and a pretty knowledgable person when it comes to the game, and in the thousands of games I've watched in my lifetime, I have never seen such a quick degradation of umpiring over such a short amount of time.

This used to be a minor thing. Umps were so well honed they rarely made a bad call. Now you can point to any game nightly and find multiple bad calls in just one game. And I'm not talking about bang-bang plays that you could understand going either way. I'm talking about big mistakes. Huge mistakes. ...Major League mistakes.

The World Umpires Association should be embarrassed at the shoddiness of the umpires have done going on these last two to two and a half seasons and Major League Baseball has to address this issue. One of these blown calls is eventually going to cost a team a playoff spot, a Championship Series or a World Series. And that would be a horrible thing. What if the Pirates lose their division by a ½ game this season? You can look directly at this game and shake your head.

Other major sports in the world use some sort of instant replay to make the game better. The NFL gives head coaches the opportunity to challenge calls. College football reviews EVERY play. Tennis uses computer graphics to make sure a ball is in or out when a player asks for a challenge. Basketball referees check instant replay to make sure a player let's a ball loose before time expires. Hockey refs check instant replay on scored goals to see if the puck has crossed the goal line.

It's a sorry excuse to say that you're showing up an umpire in asking for a replay or that it would be embarrassing for the ump. How embarrassed was Jim Joyce when he clearly blew a call that cost pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game? Instant replay review would have corrected that unthinkable mistake and saved both player and ump a lot of grief and heartache. The fact that video review is solely used for home run calls is a joke in itself. Can't they tell if the ball went over the wall or hit the foul pole? The answer is no because it got so bad a few years ago, MLB decided to add instant replay for home run calls only. Nothing else is reviewable.

Just two days ago, a ball the should have been called a double and scored two runs in one particular game was ruled foul. A 10 second replay would have shown the ball hitting the chalk line. Look, I know its a hard job that takes years to master. But when people in the stands can see an obviously bad call without the advantage of being three feet away from the play, something has to be done.

I'm sure the Ump's Association would be amenable to having a five man umpiring crew at each game, that's fifteen additional jobs, with the fifth ump reviewing each play from the video booth. It needn't take two or three minutes to decide a call like it does in the NFL when baseball booths can show replays truly in an instant, even pitch by pitch.

I'm not insisting that every ball and strike call be scrutinized, but when it comes to close plays at first base, judging if a ball is fair or foul, stolen bases, shoestring catches where the ball was possibly trapped and for God's sake, plays at the plate like last night, something has to be done. It's time to step out of the 19th Century. I know baseball is a game of tradition, but it's time to move into modern times with umpiring because horribly bad calls are also starting to become tradition.