Garth: Me? I gotta "see" a fair ball.
P-Sz: I've always had the opposite attitude
CC: ...if you don't SEE the ball fair, it is [foul].
Mick: [Your thought] sounds right, P-Sz.
Bfair: For me, when close to the line it is foul until proven to me to be fair.
Anyone else? I'm curious to know how others call it. How do they teach it in the pro schools?
Could it be that there's no "It's (fair/foul) until I see it otherwise" on this one? Perhaps we should just weigh it on the preponderance of the evidence either way, and forget about trying to assign benefit of doubt?
Carl's two examples are good, but can we really apply them to the foul ball?
PLAY: Pitch coming in, well out of the strike zone. The umpire must affirmatively see the batter swing to call it a strike. The umpire who blinks his eyes/is blocked by the catcher and misses a half-swing may "feel" that the batter swung, though the does not have reasonable evidence that it is so. Therefore, he calls "ball". When it is significantly uncertain whether the batter swung, the call must be left unchanged by the swing, giving the batter the benefit of the doubt.
PLAY: R2, grounder to short. F6 goes for the tag on R2, swiping and coming very close. It appeared that R2 SHOULD have made the play, but the umpire sees no glove deflection, sees no shirt movement, hears no impact. In reality, the glove may have just nicked him, or it may have just missed. The umpire doesn't know; the runner doesn't know; perhaps the fielder doesn't even know. There is no evidence available to the umpire that a tag occurred, only that it "maybe occurred". Therefore, the call is "safe".
Why do we do this? Shouldn't we make all calls match, in our judgment, what most likely occurred? If it is most likely that the tag touched him, by gum, he's out. After all, that's more likely to be the correct call.
Not quite. The reason we have these guidelines is to trade the gross miss (An out call on a tag we thought happened, but was clearly missed when viewed from a different angle) for a few close misses (Safe calls on a tag that barely nicked the runner).
Imagine one gross miss: Two strikes, Smitty blinks his eyes and misses an attempt at a check swing. Did he go? Everything in Smitty's gut and brain says he did, though he didn't ever see the bat out over the plate or past it. He calls "He went--Strike!", and everyone looks at him funny. Whoops. If he's lucky, the batter steps out and hacks at the air a few times. If he's unlucky, we've got an ejection.
Now, even ignoring the BU for a moment, imagine if the batter went, just like Smitty thought, but this time, he calls "Ball." No one will bat an eye, because it was a close call.
It is more important to get the call right in the first case than in the second. Yet the umpire has the same information in both cases.
Now, how does a clearly seen ball close to the foul line fit in to all that? I don't think it does. The umpire needs to make this call match, in his judgement, what most likely actually occurred.
Fill in the blank.s "The ball ain't ____ until I see it go ___ ."
The average umpire might put the same word in both blanks. Upon further consideration, I put "nothin'" in the first and "fair or foul" in the second.
P-Sz
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