Umps no match for technology
If I were a member of the umpire’s union, I’d be lobbying hard for a rule barring the facsimile strike zone that is now a part of every televised baseball game from ever being shown again.
It demonstrates just how challenged major league umpires are in getting ball-and-strike calls right.
As I’ve said before in this space, it ain’t easy. The ball, thrown by a major league pitcher standing 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate, is moving 90, 95 miles an hour; it’s dancing, it’s hoping, it’s breaking down and away, it’s riding high.
Meanwhile, the strike zone is invisible; it’s not exactly a figment of the imagination, but it comes close. Maybe the only sure thing about the strike zone is home plate, the hard white irregular pentagon bordered in black and imbedded in the dirt between the batting boxes. A pitch that splits the plate is a strike 99.9 percent of the time.
But as game after televised game demonstrates, the umpiring is frequently wrong when it comes to pitches off the plate, inside and out. The Cubs’ Jake Arrieta took particular advantage of umpire-incompetence against the Pirates during the National League wildcard game.
It’s time for MLB to admit that getting balls-and-strikes correct on a more or less regular basis is beyond the capacity of mere humans; it’s time to bring video technology to bear on the strike zone.
Speaking of Arrieta, he was pretty good in the wildcard game, though it was a game the Pirates had no business playing.
Baseball needs to do something to eliminate the possibility that teams like the Pirates will ever again be put in the position of having to play a one-and-done game.
What, 98 regular season wins isn’t enough to earn a team a place at the big boy’s table?
It is necessary to keep in mind one salient fact: the ultimate goal is to crown a league champion.
Under the current arrangement, too much is made of division champions.
Here’s a compromise, a way to accommodate both division champions and clubs that have phenomenal regular seasons.
Keep in mind the numbers 91 and 96.
Ninety-one is the number of wins a division winner must bag to stave off a team that is not a division winner with a minimum of 96 wins.
Playing under these rules, things would have worked out this way in 2015:
The National League division winners were the Cardinals with 100 wins, the Dodgers with 92, and the Mets with 90. Meanwhile, of course, the Bucs won 98 and the Cubs 97.
Sorry, Mets. You’re relegated to the wildcard game against the Cubs who, though having a great regular season, come up a win short of the Pirates.
Pirates, with the second best record in baseball, you’re playing the Dodgers in the first round of the playoffs.
In the American League, neither runnerup team, the Astros or the Yankees, came close to the 96-win threshold. As a result, the 2015 division winners the Blue Jays, the Rangers, and the Royals all move on to berths in the playoffs.
The idea is not to punish division winners; it’s to reward excellence. It holds out the possibility of making the pennant races more exciting, not less. Remember, the standard in the lead up to the World Series, is to discover the best teams in the two leagues, which means the playoffs should concentrate not so much on division winners but on the teams with the best league records over the course of a 162-game season.
(I wish there was some way to accommodate a team like the Cubs under this revised scheme; maybe division play should be eliminated altogether, making the four tops teams in the league playoff eligible. But that makes the regular season travel schedule exhausting to even think about. Divining a solution to the conundrum posed by the Cubs’ example is pretty severe.)
As a corollary to the new rules with its emphasis on league, and because it’s no longer an curious, exciting experiment, interleague play should be shelved.
One final thing: let’s not subject baseball to a November World Series. If the World Series goes to a seventh game this year, the final out in the final inning will play out on Nov. 4, or Nov. 5, if it’s a late game. Say it ain’t so.
The playoffs should begin no later than Oct. 1. This can be done. The solution is not to chop games from the schedule. Rather, more Sunday doubleheaders are needed — enough to shorten the season by a week or more.
Oh, heck, while I’m at it: let’s do away with those curiously inept video replays, at least until the seventh inning. Let’s bring fan catcalls and umpire-manager arguments back to the game.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.