Having spent decades covering sporting events for newspapers, I heard more than my share of fans whining about the officiating being biased.
There were isolated instances when I agreed. More often, viewing from the emotionally detached position of rooting for neither side, I saw mostly fair calls.
Yes, some calls were bad, but it didn’t necessarily favor one team. They were just mistakes without an agenda.
Watching the baseball postseason, I’m here to tell you the umpiring has been shaky, particularly on the subject of calling balls and strikes, or checked swings.
It’s not that one team is necessarily getting the shaft from the umpires, but try telling that to the San Francisco fans who saw their team eliminated when an obvious check swing was instead called a swing and a miss.
Batter out. Game, series and season over just that quickly on one horrendous call.
Most of poor umpiring is not as dramatic, but it is determining outcomes.
In Game 1 of the American League Championship Series, right-handed Boston hitter J.D. Martinez, an accomplished batsman with a good concept of the strike zone, kept having outside pitches called strikes against him.
At least he thought so and the telecast’s strike zone graphic confirmed his opinion.
Eventually, Martinez had to begin swinging at those outside pitches and it didn’t go well.
Bad calls can put hitters in the hole in terms of the ball-strike count. Similarly, good pitches called balls put the pitchers behind in the count, making hitters comfortable and thereby more dangerous and lessening the effectiveness of pitchers.
It was merely opinion before the technology was developed to superimpose a strike zone box on the broadcast. Now there is instant confirmation of what fans long had thought – home plate umpires miss an awful lot of calls.
Mostly these are consistently inaccurate, penalizing both teams. But, if the umpires make mistakes in crucial moments for your team – think the San Francisco check swing – it’s only human nature to see grand theft.
Baseball has no monopoly on this. Already in this NFL and college football seasons there have been blown calls that left the broadcast officiating experts at a loss to cover up for their former colleagues on the field.
NHL officiating has been miserable for decades, particularly the trend toward officiating with the score in mind. Teams behind tend to get more power plays.
NHL games in overtime, especially in the playoffs, have the referees pocket their whistles lest they be accused of determining the outcome. And so the players, fully knowing this, commit atrocious infractions secure in the knowledge that more likely than not they will not be sent to the penalty box.
NBA officials are similarly lame, often ignoring fouls committed by star players and, when some defender breathes on those stars, foul calls come quickly against that defender.
Add in that NBA players can run a 100-yard dash without dribbling and not be called for traveling and you have NBA officiating neatly defined.
Apologists contend officiating gaffes are just part of the game, no different than a player striking out, dropping a pass, missing a shot or allowing a soft goal.
But players who strike out too often, drop too many passes, miss too many shots or let in too many cheap goals, find themselves unemployed.
Umpires and officials in other sports are graded, but some of the worst offenders inexplicably linger season after season to blow calls, sometimes in critical situations. We all deserve better.
Sam Ross Jr's site 