("What Umpires Get Wrong")
Lou Piniella, Billy Martin, Earl Weaver. Leg kicking, dirt flying, chest bumping, cap askewing, base throwing, expletive producing, mayhem. Should this all be deleted with a push of a button?
This is, after all the 21st century. The bad boys of tennis,
from Nastase to Connors and finally the king of the potty mouth,
McEnroe, have disappeared as our gaze turns to the giant screen in the
sky for answers.Lou Piniella, Billy Martin, Earl Weaver. Leg kicking, dirt flying, chest bumping, cap askewing, base throwing, expletive producing, mayhem. Should this all be deleted with a push of a button?
And John Madden's face would today have far fewer opportunities to turn ever increasing shades of angry over an act of sheer incompetence, as the not so instant replay booth takes human error out of the equation.
Is part of the fabric of
all these games the imperfection of those adjudicating or is the
umpire/referee/official merely a distraction, an unnecessary distortion
of the athletic endeavor?
What would happen to baseball if 0% of the calls were
blown? We could measure the height and depth of the pine tar on the bat
of Mr. Brett and leave him with nothing but a computer printout to
protest. Armando Galarraga would have his perfect game, and the
heartfelt apology of Jim Joyce would never have been heard. I can even
well imagine the tones of the artificial voice advising the beleaguered
batter "Strike three yer out."
In 2040 when Derek Jeter's son is trying to leg what
appears to be a routine single into an improbable two bagger, will we be
waiting to learn his fate from hand signals on the ground, or from the
computer's infallible information that flashes on the screen on the back
of the seat directly in front of each one of us?
If "kill the ump" becomes nothing more than an artifact,
will we have advanced or fallen prey to our own achievements? Will we be
taking the humanity out of the equation or accomplishing what we have
always sought?
At what cost perfection?
No comments:
Post a Comment