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Old Thu Oct 09, 2003, 12:39am
Nevadaref Nevadaref is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2002
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The main advantage as I see it would be that the AR now has the authority to stop the game when needed to take care of something that happens behind the Ref's back. (Note: this doesn't mean that you have to stop the game for something away from the play, just as in basketball the AR would have to use good discretion on when to do this, but simply having the power to do so might stop a lot of the cheap stuff. Cleaning up the off-ball play was the main reason for putting a third official on basketball games. In soccer he is already there; all we have to do is empower him.)
Have you ever had something occur and you can't get the R's attention or the play goes to the other end and due to the flow of the game it becomes too late to handle it when the R finally comes back. (I know the pros use beeper flags for this.)
Instead of having three officials out there what we have now is one official with two helpers. This does not foster teamwork.
In basketball no official has the authority to overrule the call of another, but they can discuss the call and attempt to convince him otherwise. I think this system works far better than the current DSC.
Look at the play in tonight's baseball game between the Yankees and Red Sox. With 6 guys out there, they really have to work as a team, and that was most clearly apparent on the homerun off the foul pole. Originally, Angel Hernandez, who was on the right field line, called it foul, then home plate umpire Tim McClelland came out and instructed the hitter to keep running while they talked about it. The TV announcers made it sound like he overruled him (and maybe he did, I don't do baseball and don't know if he has the power to do so), but if you listened to Joe Torre's postgame interview he said that Tim told him that he and three other umpires saw it as a homerun, so he had to accept that and walk away. That sounds like the rest of the crew convinced him he was incorrect to me.
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