Making the Call

[insatty]

In a previous thread about a bases-loaded walked-in winning-run runner barely missing home, I quoted Carl Childress's excellent advise against an extraordinary call on an ordinary play. Carl's advise in his tome, "51 Ways to Ruin a Baseball Game," credits Jim Porter's advise about the expected call (Porter's apt analogy to "brown" versus "burnt sienna").

My Childress quote prevoked a hot response from Freix and others, and I suspect that Freix's "renowned member" refers to Childress. Childress to his credit notes that in Pro Baseball his advise is tempered by the omnipresent TV camera, requiring umpires to call the obvious even in the absence of a disadvantage.

But I continue to believe that the strict-adherence-to-the-rules-no-matter-how-ticky-tack umpiring philosophy is dead wrong. If the rule violation that creates no disadvantage is so close that only the umpire sees it, it should not be called. Without the benefit of instant replay, the offical may be wrong (and even with instant replay, a call may not be clearly confirmable nor refutable as all Oakland Raider Fans know too well; Oakland legitimately caused a fumble and deserved to beat New England). This advantage-disadvantage theory serves football so well that no football official will advance beyond Pop Warner Mighty Mights if he doesn't understand and apply this theory for non-safety fouls.

As officials, I believe we must remember that our role is to make the game fair and enjoyable to play and watch. Strict rules knowledge is as required as knowing when to invoke those rules to penalize. Thus, like Mike Winters I call McGwire out on the obvious missed base, but deny the appeal for the walked-in game-winning runner who barely misses home because he and his surrounding ecstatic teammates are celebrating a great game.