Umpires and Referees

A cou­ple of weeks ago I had to go to a restau­rant to watch the Pack­ers play the Red­skins since the game was not on any of the cable chan­nels I get. Dur­ing the sec­ond half a Red­skin fan sat down at the table next to mine. It was not too long before we exchanged a cou­ple of com­ments on the game. Soon after that he start­ed com­plain­ing about the offi­ci­at­ing. I about lost it (only about though). In the first place, I can’t stand it when peo­ple blame the refs. In the sec­ond place, the refs in that Packer/​Redskin game were not doing any favors for the Pack­ers any more than favors for the Redskins.

When I got home I checked the blogs and, sure enough, there was no short­age of Pack­er fans com­plain­ing about the refs.

The ref­er­ee­ing in the NFL is sim­ply bad. The only virtue it has is that all plays are called equal­ly bad­ly and all teams get their turn at being screwed over. Still, good ref­er­ee­ing would be bet­ter than bad.

Tonight I am watch­ing the Phils and Giants play for the Nation­al League penant. The game is on Fox. On replays of pitch­es, Fox has the graph­ic of the strike zone show­ing exact­ly where the pitch was locat­ed. It is amus­ing to lis­ten to the announc­er, Tim McCarv­er, when the umpire calls the pitch a strike and the graph­ic shows the pitch was clear­ly a ball. McCarv­er just ignores the graph­ic com­plete­ly and, as the replay of the pitch is shown, talks about how the pitch caught the out­side of the plate. The replay clear­ly looks like it was out­side and the graph­ic con­firms it, but we don’t want to show up the umpires.

Umpir­ing in base­ball is slight­ly bet­ter than what goes on in the NFL, but the ball and strike call­ing is a joke. The rest of the calls are usu­al­ly cor­rect, but there are still plen­ty of errors.

I won­der how long it will be before sports real­ly embraces tech­nol­o­gy to help call the games.

6 thoughts on “Umpires and Referees”

  1. What again, is this lan­guage you speak ?

    BTW: I had a sci­ence teacher in high school who had played for the packers.

  2. Dad speaks this lan­guage a lot. Sport­sese, I think, is what it’s called. It was­n’t a required course at school, so I’ve only picked up a term here and there.

  3. You know they say it only takes one ball to play baseball.

    And it doen’t take any, to watch…

    ;o)

  4. I’ve nev­er heard that said before. And it may even be true. It is also true that it takes no mon­ey to cross a street, but mil­lion­aires do it frequently.

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