Quote:
Originally Posted by Cobra
In a baseball game there is a ground ball batted ball to the infield. The fielder fielder throws to first base, the ball gets there and the runner is still 30 feet away. It is easily discerned by everyone (who saw the entire play clearly) that the ball beat the runner. Is it a judgement call? What if the runner was out by 10 feet? 5 feet? 1 foot? Half of a foot? At what point does it become a judgement call? The way it actually works is that they are all judgement calls. It is just that some are much more obvious than others. The official might get distracted and get an obvious call wrong.
It is the same thing in the basketball situation. The officials took their eyes off the ball and all of a sudden it is rolling on the rim and goes through the basket. They have to make a judgement as to what happened. None of them saw a second player shoot the ball, they have no reason to think that the ball didn't go in off the original shot so they count the score.
The key thing to remember is that the officials must adjudge what happened. What actually happened does not matter. All that matters is what the officials have.
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More apt and realistic comparison would be a batted ball that clears the outfield fence on the fly and then bounds off the hill behind it back into the field of play but the umpires say it never cleared the fence.