{"id":156,"date":"2007-05-01T19:23:46","date_gmt":"2007-05-01T18:23:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=156"},"modified":"2009-09-26T11:08:25","modified_gmt":"2009-09-26T10:08:25","slug":"sympathy-for-the-devil-aka-sports-officials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=156","title":{"rendered":"Sympathy for the devil (AKA sports officials)"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all recognise that even the best pitcher can hang a curveball up in the zone every now and then, just as the best hitter can be made to look foolish on a change-up every once in a while. Yet few sports fans are so understanding when it comes to the officials making mistakes. We always expect perfection from them and boy do we let them know when we think they’ve got something wrong. <\/p>\n

If it’s a bang-bang play at first base, a close LBW decision or a tight offside call, once you have calmed down a bit you can generally accept that the official made the decision as they saw it and that every now and then they will just get it wrong. It’s a simple case of human error that you can never eliminate and even technology such as TV referrals are not fool-proof.<\/p>\n

However, the general task of officials in any given sport is to run the game. They are in charge and it is their responsibility to make sure everything is conducted in compliance with the rules of the sport. On Saturday we saw two very strange sporting incidents involving the way officials ran their respective games. <\/p>\n

The ICC Cricket World Cup final ended in complete and utter farce, which was sadly a very fitting climax to a tournament so atrociously organised (which, again, is sadly representative of the way the ICC runs cricket in general). You can read a summary<\/a> on the BBC’s website, but effectively the umpires didn’t have a clue whether the match was over or not. As the BBC’s game blogger recorded at the time: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153This is now a farce. All we need is for Steve Bucknor [umpire] to accidentally drop his trousers or squash a custard pie into Ricky Ponting’s [Australia’s captain] face.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/em><\/p>\n

On the same night, the umpire crew running the Baltimore-Cleveland game made a complete hash of it by officially awarding the Orioles a run, three innings after the play in question. Nick Markakis’s run was initially wiped-off despite the fact that he had crossed home plate before the Tribe had got the third out of the inning. The run should have counted and eventually the correct decision was made, yet in this case it clearly altered the state of the game as the Indians suddenly found themselves behind 3-2 rather than level at 2-2. The Indians have lodged an appeal and it would certainly seem fair if the game was replayed, although it’s unlikely this will happen.<\/p>\n

Suffice to say, these situations are the stuff of nightmares for officials and I’ve no doubt that those concerned will feel very apologetic (not to mention embarrassed) to have made such crucial errors. But they were not split-second decisions relating to a close play; they were examples of the officials forgetting the rules, which is unacceptable. <\/p>\n

Thankfully such incidents are extremely rare in baseball (not so much in cricket, e.g. the end to the 2005 Ashes series, the ball-tampering row last summer etc!) and we should look at it in this context. The odd times when things go wrong serve to highlight how often the officials do their job well. People generally say a good football referee is one you don’t notice. While I understand the sentiments, in some ways that says more about us fans than it does about the referee. We should<\/em> notice when the officials do their job well. No proper sport can function without them and it is all too easy to take them for granted. <\/p>\n

Mistakes such as those on Saturday will happen from time to time and it’s important that everyone learns from them (I’m sure every umpire has double-checked the rules as a result). It’s completely right to criticise such errors, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the many decisions made on a daily basis that they get correct and receive little to no thanks for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We all recognise that even the best pitcher can hang a curveball up in the zone every now and then, just as the best hitter can be made to look foolish on a change-up every once in a while. Yet few sports fans are so understanding when it comes to the officials making mistakes. We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[553],"class_list":["post-156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4299,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions\/4299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}