[His High Holiness]

Originally posted by cbfoulds

This is about the stupidest, most self-defeatist load of garbage I have ever read.

First of all, even when a umpire kicks a call, the coaches and players are still not justified in making a$$es of themselves by crying and bit&hing about it. If they get obnoxious or just will not STFU after a while, their stupidity is the "cause" of their ejection.

Secondly, what is this "probably get it wrong" BS?
Why in the hell do we buy into the assinine conceit of idiot coaches that they can see what happened in a bang-bang play better from 90 to 150 feet away than we can at 15 feet? In a game coached by a pair of rats, you will catch a ration of crap from one side or the other on every banger. Does this mean you probably got ALL of the calls wrong? Be serious!!

Cbfoulds;

You wrote:

"This is about the stupidest, most self-defeatist load of garbage I have ever read."

I guess you do not read Rut posts.

Several years ago, I wrote a piece about the human brain being unable to determine events less than 0.04 seconds apart. Someone in my local area read this and took the trouble to videotape umpires calling wackers at first base in a training environment. He was able to tape about 50 wackers that were determined by less than 0.04 seconds.

Logically, it would seem that the umpires would get about 50% right. If they are guessing, they should be right half the time. By slowing the the tape, he was able to determine that they got only about 30% right. 50% were definitely wrong and 20% were too close to call even with freeze-frame videotape.

For the portion that he was able to get a definitive answer, the rookie umpires were wrong 62% of the time. Go figure. An article on politics, coach influence, and psychology could be written on why this happened.

You also wrote:

In a game coached by a pair of rats, you will catch a ration of crap from one side or the other on every banger. Does this mean you probably got ALL of the calls wrong? Be serious!!"

There is a school of thought among serious umpires that the answer to your question is yes. They are dead serious. You got them all wrong. (Rich Humphrey, a AAA umpire who worked some MLB ball during a 1980's strike, has a 30 minute presentation on this subject.)

Only when you recognize that you are always wrong, can you formulate a strategy to deal with the chaos. Joseph Stalin did not worry about being wrong. He worried about being obeyed and feared. Although it is not well documented in the West, Joseph Stalin dealt with far more serious uprisings and Muslim rebellions than the current chaos in Chechnya. By regularly executing and torturing large numbers of people, he did not have to deal with terrorist escapades like are currently going on in Russia.

All we have to do is eject them.

Peter