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I'm not shouting at you tcarilli. I am directing my emphaticness at certain individuals that seem to want to argue the fact that I was being negative to Scott Higgins.
I'm being negative to MLB policy.
Think about this for one moment. Who makes the rules in MLB? Definitely not the men in blue (read:black). Who decided that there needed to be a statement issued on how to handle pitchers that pitch high and tight? It wasn't any umpire (Sandy Alderson). Who is it that is evaluating the major league umpires currently? It's not ex-pro umpires. It's the vie-president in Alderson's office. Forgive me, but his name currently eludes me. This is not to say that there aren't some ex-pro's doing the day to day evaluation. But, the power ultimately rests with an executive under Alderson's thumb.
I'm not arguing that the league doesn't have the power to dictate policy and rules. My point is they should do so very sparingly. Did you ever hear an umpire quoted last year saying that there needed to be a policy on pitching up and in? No, because they handled it with no problem the way they've been handling it for the last 20 years. Pitching up and in is part of the PROFESSIONAL game of baseball. Like it or not. I beleive the reason there is currently a policy on the issue is because owners (all of whom contribute to running the league, hell why not, they own it)don't want their twenty five million dollar man (read:A-Rod) being thrown at. Regardless of how much body armor players wear or how bad they crowd the plate.
The NCAA has been smart about this. We now have a Secretary Rules Editor that is an umpire. ALL evaluations are done by current umpires and ex-college umpires. Makes sense, huh!
My only point in making the original post was that the league is dictating so much policy to umpires that they've now put umpires at the focal point of the game rather than the players and the teams. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that Scott Higgins did not want to throw the guy out of the game. I've seen the guy work too many times in the PCL. He was pressured into making a call on the field not by rule, not by instinct, but by Alderson's policy. This is not a good thing. Let the men in blue do they're jobs and leave them alone. They're the best in the world, after all.
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