I’ve loved baseball since I was a kid. I collected cards & played Dice Baseball with my own rules & NO UMPIRES. The game has changed & not for the better. I want to see Barry Bonds & Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame before they croak. I don’t want to see ads for gambling, which is what baseball has chosen to suck up to so they can fund the salaries of mediocre players. I’m just getting started…
Umpires need a day of reckoning. Long ago, when I was a kid, we accepted their calls, for the most part, as Gospel. We didn’t have the strike zone box, but even that hasn’t curbed umpires from being so far off base. The rule changes are meant to speed up the game, but the ridiculous technology that was implemented to signal between pitchers & catchers what pitch to throw with a runner on second base has broken down miserably. As a result, more time is wasted trying to get these devices to function.
Next year, we’ll have more changes, including one that adds a clock to the mix for pitchers to throw a pitch & batters to be ready in the batter’s box, all in the interest of speeding up the game. This is going to create chaos, as once again, it will be umpires being given more power to influence outcomes of games. There will be additional time wasted when pitchers, batters & managers become outraged at the consequences of these calls. We need less opportunities for umpires to determine winners & losers.
I have subscribed to MLB baseball to listen to my Giants games since that service was offered. It worked fine until this year. All of a sudden, MLB can’t synchronize the audio to match the Gameday pitches being shown. This is an embarrassment for MLB that, with all their money & technology prowess, they are about four to five pitches behind the Gameday pitches with their announcer’s audio. They charge $19.99 a year for this aberation that is a pure amateur product. The announcers didn’t catch up to the Gameday pitches for the entire 2022 season. It was fine before this year, so what bungling fool screwed things up so bad they couldn’t fix it?
Now we have ads in between innings while the announcers are doing the play by play. The 15 or so second spots even promote gambling while Pete Rose must be fuming that he’s not allowed in the Hall of Fame because he gambled. Even more insidious is the MLB crawl that provides betting lines for all games instead of what used to be a running scoreboard.
Great job Aaron Judge, but don’t even think he broke the MLB homerun record, Roger Maris, Jr. That honor belongs to Barry Bonds, who never failed a drug test & was only found guilty of a ramblng answer at his trial. The substance he used was not classified as illegal at the time he allegedly used it. Meanwhile, Babe Ruth is in the Hall of Fame, despite his frequenting Speakeasies while alcohol was illegal. You can claim that alcohol is not an enhancement for players, but having seen both William Bendix & John Goodman in Biopic Movies about Ruth, when the Yankees kept him from going drinking, the following day, he couldn’t hit the ball. Drinking was the stimulant that allowed Ruth to hit the ball instead of strike out! I don’t want Ruth removed, but I damn well want to see Barry Bonds given his due, as he won seven MVPs & belongs in the Hall of Fame, along with Pete Rose, Roger Clemens & Babe Ruth.
Umpires have egoes that interfere with their fair judgment. Last year in the playoffs, the Giants, who had won a team record 107 games, became a victim of such chicannery when after the umpire called two balls on Chris Bryant in the 5th & final game of the Dodgers/Giants series with no score, he then called two strikes where one was so high & out of the box by enough as to be an egrigious call. Then came what was called ball 3, but should have actually been ball 4. The next pitch was also a ball, but as Bryant dropped his bat & started to first base, the umpire, not wanting to be upstaged, called this low ball 5 a strike & Bryant was called out.
An emotional umpire is the worst example of integrity to the game, when they get back at a player & call them out. At the time, Brandon Crawford was on first & it would have set the Giants up with no outs & runners on first & second. Dodgers pitcher Julio Urias then threw a wild pitch, which would have put runners on second & third with no outs. Instead it was a man on second with one out. The next batter hit a slow roller up the middle where the runner was thrown out at first. Because of that bad umpire call, it was a runner on third with two outs instead of the runner at third scoring the first run. What should have been a 1-0 lead for the Giants ended without the Giants scoring first. That turned the game around. The outcome was marred by Umpire Dave Eddings' blown calls.
It gets worse, as in the bottom of the 9th inning with Max Scherzer pitching in relief & a runner on first with two outs, Wilmer Flores had two strikes on him with Evan Longoria on deck (he homered off Scherzer in game 3). Flores appeared to check his swing. Eddings asked rookie umpire Gabe Morales to make the call & he determined Flores had swung, despite video replay that showed he was wrong. Later, Morales would claim he didn’t have the benefit of seeing the replay (just think of how many times replays have overturned umpires calls). That an umpire’s call ended the season without the benefit of a replay, which isn’t allowed, is quite a bitter pill to swallow.
While writing this to identify the culprits, I saw a headline by Adam Weinrib — 'Dodgers lost NLDS Game 3 despite umpire trying to hand them a win’ about game 3 of the same series. The article concluded that crew chief Ted Barrett was sub par, rating only 88% accuracy for his calls. It further made the following observation, "Regardless of your rooting interest, this remains a fairly ironclad argument for robot umpiring, too. A sport has to have the 'eye test' and the 'human element,' sure, and that’s all lovely, but having a momentum-turning postseason game called with 88% accuracy, six percentage points below the season average, is unacceptable.” I can’t wait for the robots to take over!
One final thought to prove that analytics can only go so far...last year, the Giants won 107 games, a franchise record & Gabe Kapler was Manager of the Year in the NL. This year, same manager, mostly same team with addition of Carlos Rodon & Joc Pederson while losing Kevin Gausman to free agency & Buster Posey to retirement, they barely made it to .500 on the last day of a poor followup season, missing the playoffs. The real difference was in 2021, most players had career years, but in 2022, many were not playing as well. Kapler’s playing it by the same analytical ‘book’ didn’t work so well either, when the same players had off years. I believe it raises some questions about the validation of analytics that Kapler received as Manager of the Year.