28 Up: Jim, Armando, and the state of the umpires’ union
In the Griffey comments thread, reader Suzanne asked what I thought of Jim Joyce’s perfect-game-ruining call against Armando Galarraga and the Tigers the other night.
I feel for everyone involved. It’s a shame Galarraga lost the perfecto, but at the same time, that’s…baseball, as it were. Pitchers have no-hitters and perfect games broken up in the ninth all the time, and it’s not always going to be on a black-and-white, no-question play. The Joyce call is more blatantly (and blame-ably) unjust a demonstration of this concept than most, but how would we feel if an outfielder had muffed a route behind Galarraga, and the official scorer had ruled it a hit; or if Galarraga had sailed the throw, and the ump in turn called the runner out so as not to trifle with the perfecto; or if Jason Donald had bunted to get on base. A perfect game requires a lot of good breaks; Galarraga didn’t get every good break he needed.
I wish he had, but MLB can’t just reverse calls, even in a case like this. Expanded instant replay is another matter, and I’ll discuss that in a sec, but umpires represent law and order on the field, for lack of a better term, and in order for them to maintain respect for every call (more or less; obviously players and managers argue calls all the time), umpires have to stand behind every individual call, even when they know they’ve fucked up. Otherwise, it’s chaos, and it is one of the first things they teach you. It’s one of the first things Ron Luciano mentions in his books, and it’s one of the first things I learned while umping Little League: you do not reverse the call, period.
You don’t have to get your dick on about it, but if you falter and say “well, I guess you’ve got a point” or “I have to admit, I didn’t have a good angle”…it’s like not showing fear to dogs and small children. (Literally, in my case.) If you reverse one call, you lose your credibility on all the ones that come after it.
Jim Joyce obviously feels shitty about what happened, but he was right not to overrule himself, Selig was right not to overrule him after the fact, and if we look at the plus side, under the regrettable circumstances, everyone’s done the best we could expect. Galarraga may be seething, but he’s not letting it show; he’s being a generous soul about it. (And I see that he got a Corvette for his trouble, which is nice, in the sense that it’s hilariously inexplicable, but: Detroit, I guess.) Joyce has manned up and faced the fallout. The Detroit fans haven’t booed Joyce too badly. Everyone involved seems to have the proper handle, for a blessed effing change, on the fact that these are all human beings, not machines, and that crap like that is going to happen sometimes when you choose to continue using human officiants, in a game played by humans.
However.
The Joyce Incident is, to paraphrase my dad’s business partner, a package containing two problems: 1) Joyce set up at a less-than-ideal angle on that play, given its importance, and 2) instant replay was not a factor in the final decision. The first problem does not strike me as an outlier in the last season or so; a general umpiring reform of some sort seems to be in order. Joe West’s various becoming-the-story comments and behavior; the weird Rays ejections earlier in the week; the failure to call the high strike — it’s like there’s an umpire story every other day on the Baseball Today podcast, and it’s inappropriate somehow. On top of that, while the umps aren’t as uniformly — or, occasionally, grossly — overweight as they were 30 years ago, some of them can’t get into position to see the call properly. That’s no good.
They don’t have to get it right every time, and in fact they can’t. I only umped Little League, and only for a few months total, but I know what it’s like — there’s a lot going on out there, just on a single routine play, and what looks like it isn’t “close” to us…I mean, it’s centimeters and milliseconds out there. This isn’t to excuse Joyce, who isn’t a rookie, knew what was on the line at the time, and should have done better. My point is that we all — fans, pitchers, whoever — can take a Zen attitude towards the Joyce call and others like it, but only if the umpires have committed to professionalism elsewhere, and the MLB umpires have taken their eye off that ball of late, in my opinion.
The second problem is that instant replay is not comprehensive enough. It needn’t be ubiquitous; the chief argument against it is apparently that it will slow the games down, and I swear to God, if people employed to watch baseball and talk about it don’t stop complaining about the length of the games, I don’t know what. It’s baseball, friends. It goes on awhile. Maybe you want to cover boxing; that shit’s over in seventeen seconds sometimes. Chrissakes. …Anyway: it’s eminently possible to deploy replay in a way that actually speeds up the game by preventing long arguments, reshuffled lineups after ejections, and so on. Restrict its use to certain types of plays — disputed home runs; plays at the plate; whatever you like — and to certain circumstances (late and close, for instance). Maybe each team gets one replay challenge, and then each game has one or two in reserve that both managers must agree to use; maybe each team gets a budget of challenges for the entire season. If you keep the footage queued up and the viewer near the field, it should really only take a few minutes each time.
Umpires should want the replay; they don’t want to show up on Baseball Tonight for disputed calls and outraged news cycles like this. I would have loved a means by which I could back off a parent who bombed up to the foul line all vinegared up because I “missed” a call — because I probably didn’t miss it. I, two feet away from second base, probably saw the play better than Wallstreet McPicnicblanket did from the playground behind left field, and also I didn’t have a blood relative on base so my objectivity isn’t maybe quite as questionable, but it’s for kids, and it’s important for them to feel fairly done by, so hell yes, roll the tape, and if I bricked, I will put little Topher back on second, and we will proceed.
Replay could help determine which umpires truly deserve postseason berths, too; that system needs changing. I respect how tough it is to do what umpires do, physically and mentally, when the best you can hope for at work is that you don’t get booed, but I think we’ve reached a point where the umpires (and/or their union) have lost sight of the relationship between respect and integrity. If fans and players and MLB management are expected to respect the umpires, on the field and off, and to respect what they do in spite of the mistakes they make, the umpires need to do everything they can to cut down on those mistakes, and to acknowledge mistakes they’ve already made.
Joyce got the latter part exactly right; the rest of the union needs to make the former a bigger priority. Also, Joyce’s mustache is awesome. So, there’s that.
One last note, while I’m up: Don Denkinger has become the shorthand for horrendous calls over the last 25 years. I remember that call, and it was egregious, but you know what I think consistently gets overlooked, with both that call and the infamous Buckner grounder the next year? The teams “victimized” by both these incidents had another whole game to pull it together. These things did not happen in Game Sevens. I watched that grounder squirt away from Buckner from behind five pillows, slung into a ball of despairing tension, and at the time, I felt simultaneously grateful for the minor miracle, sorry for Buckner, and worried about the next game’s starter, because the Mets had a whole game to get through still. That play didn’t decide the ’86 Series.
Bill James on the denouement of the ’85 Series:
I can’t understand what happened then. The Royals mounted another challenge — as they had all game — and the Cardinals this time simply fell apart; there is no other way to put it. Jorge Orta beat out an infield single, and Clark argued briefly about the call, and in the nine and one-half innings remaining in the 1985 World Series the Cardinals did absolutely nothing that would remind one of a contending team.
I’ve read that essay a dozen times, and I’ve always found it interesting that James, an avowed Royals fan who was writing more or less contemporaneously (I believe the piece appeared in the 1986 Baseball Abstract), doesn’t give The Infamous Call much attention. He doesn’t mention Denkinger by name until the next page, in fact, and then only to note that “it couldn’t have mattered less if it was Ray Charles [behind the plate]. John Tudor had nothing.”
A few pages later, after musing on the Cardinals’ conception of their own destiny that year, and dismissing post-Series comments from Whitey Herzog to the effect that the Cardinals “deserved” to win because they had a better regular-season record than the Royals, James says,
The Cardinals’ only argument is that, because of the way things worked out, they deserved to win despite being badly outplayed in most phases of the game. The argument is, giving it every advantage, that the Cardinals are a superior team, but merely disintegrated in the face of a bad call. Hell of a defense.
Yeah, pretty much. I’ve seen Denkinger talk to Costas, still coming off as a little too defensive than is seemly, but I kind of can’t blame the guy, because I feel like he’s still getting blamed for “losing” that Series “for” the Cardinals, when the fact is, they lost it, because they…lost it. The Royals jumped all over them for a bunch of runs in the seventh game, and the Cards just melted down. And hey, that happens too. To come that far and get that close and watch the scoreboard running away from you…okay, they acted pathetic. Who knows how you or I would have done.
But you know whose fault that isn’t? Denkinger’s. The error after that isn’t on him, Dane Iorg’s single isn’t on him, Herzog deciding to throw gas on the fire with Andujar in the next game isn’t on him. Tudor’s dead arm isn’t on him. Bad calls happen, to everyone, and a bad call didn’t cost the Cards the Classic that year — a dinky offense and a lapse in mental toughness did. If a bad call the night before causes most of the team to vapor-lock when the lead gets up to five runs, well, maybe that team is not so much a world champion.
And I think most people know that, but then we’ve got a whole part of the news cycle devoted to Denkinger’s reaction to the Joyce call. Can we now, please, 25 years later, consider leaving Denkinger out of these discussions? Can he just not come to the phone anymore when reporters call? I want umps held accountable, but that account is paid several times over; the Royals won, fairly.
We can’t banish mistakes from baseball; we can only hope that the human beings who make them try to make it right as best they can. That has happened in the Galarraga/Joyce situation, as far as it’s possible, so let’s content ourselves with that, because it’s actually quite something.
Tags: Armando Galarraga Bill Buckner Bob Costas Country Joe West Dane Iorg Don Denkinger Jason Donald Jim Joyce Joaquin Andujar John Tudor Ron Luciano Whitey Herzog World Serieseseses
Thanks so much for this, as a lifelong Detroit fan (for whom Wednesday night was the emotional rollercoaster ride of the CENTURY) I was really looking forward to your two cents on the matter. I respect your opinions on baseball and generally agree with what you sat.
Even as that call was happening and I was screaming, “OUT, OUT, WHAT?!?!?!” I knew it wouldn’t and couldn’t be reversed. That’s baseball, and it hurt me in this case, but reversing one call would cheapen a whole lot of others. Instant replay may well be coming, which I guess at this point I wouldn’t object to the way I used to want to, but for this call, the case is closed.
I’m just proud of my Tigers and of Galarraga specifically, as well as Joyce. I feel all parties handled the situation with championship class and grace, and Armando says he knows he was perfect, so do his teammates, so do – well, everyone, including Joyce. It’s almost worth it to me, as the Tigers are getting a fair bit more attention now than they would have if it had just been the third (!!!) perfect game in a weird, weird month.
The whole thing just made me want to cry. Ugh.
I admit the precedent argument, and I still want the call overturned. I realize, though, that this is possibly the least unbiased opinion of all time.
Why hasn’t Obama stepped up in this time of national crisis? I think a beer summit is in order.
Agreed. I didn’t want the call reversed by Selig, but I think that was mostly because it feels like this game is already an asterisk next to the perfect game count. Like, there have been x number of perfect games, plus that one time Galarraga threw one that didn’t count. I’ve appreciated that the sportsmanship factor has actually been the bigger story, because it does deserve that kind of attention. Our local newspaper wrote a blistering commentary about how the NBA should pay attention to Galarraga’s reaction that night and- word.
As for replay, I really think it can be done correctly, and it will be done correctly. I read a good opinion piece about how you don’t have to like replay to understand that baseball cannot go into the future ignoring that the technology exists. As he pointed out, nostalgia isn’t a good business model.
The car . . . I can’t explain that one to you. Chevy is a huge sponsor of the team and they need the good PR right now, so they jumped on it. What was nice is that they say that they gave it to him for his display of sportsmanship. So, even if it was all a huge PR stunt, at least they tried to spin it right.
@Elizabeth: Obama roots for a team in their division, so somehow I feel like his interference wouldn’t go Galarraga’s way. Heh.
FloridaErin: the fact that Galarraga didn’t get the perfecto actually works in our favor there, because he’s just been so great about it, and now the Tigers look like a bunch of super-classy guys. I hate the whole “scrappy team lifts Detroit spirits” sports narrative we’re always subjected to by national publications, but in this case, it’s nice to have everybody in the country saying “gosh, that kid’s a real good sport, look how well Detroit’s handling things.”
Plus everybody pretty much counts it as a perfect game in their heads anyway; the state governor issued a Twitter proclamation to that effect. Hee.
Sars: The White House issued a statement supporting Galarraga, which I thought was awfully weird, but I guess they get asked about everything so I shouldn’t be surprised.
If a beer summit doesn’t work, the prez could always strong-arm Selig with a threat that the Supremes might feel like reevaluating Flood v. Kuhn one of these days if certain steps aren’t taken. That’s an awful nice anti-trust exemption you got there, buddy. Be a shame if something was ta happen to it.
I’m not so much angry at Selig for not reversing the call, because of precedent as I am at MLB for dragging their heels so long on instant replay. The technology is there, the will is there, and it is WAY beyond time for it to happen. I mean really, baseball, is the Catholic Church an organization you want to emulate in glacial rate of change?
@Elizabeth. I might have cried a few Tiger fan tears.
You know, all this Galarraga is lovely and Leyland is awesome (but, when is he ever not awesome) and the Tigers are classy and Detroit is noble stuff is good but what would have been way better is instant replay and/or the right call to begin with. The only good that comes out of this, permanent good, is instant replay.
beautifully said, Sars.
must confess that I have been so out of it lately that I keep thinking, “Galarraga a pitcher? Wow, that was a career switch… oh, wait.”
re Denkinger: …and then can we let poor Steve Bartman off the hook? I don’t think he was within 15 miles of Cubs Stadium for the last game of that series.
@Jessica – even here in Detroit, we’re saying “Galarraga? Really?” Hopefully, it’s the start of good things for him this season.
Initially, I wanted the call overturned — not so much for Galarraga (his asterisk will always be a much more interesting story than a perfect game), but for Joyce. Joyce has been a solid ump, and it would be a shame to have his career defined by a blown call. But, because of his emotional apology after the game and at the ballpark the next day, the story is turning out to be about his graciousness rather than the blown call. I hope that will play out in the history books, too.
One would think that Joyce’s response (the shortly-after-the-game-finished public acknowledgment of the error, his emotional self-censure, his refusal to dodge the next day’s game knowing that the crowd would have something to say to him) and the immediate turnaround in crowd sentiment from raging hate to admiration would be a lesson to those caught in public error.
It won’t be, but it oughta.
Great summary of the umpiring issues, Sars. Thanks.
As a Cards fan, I blamed Denkinger for the Series loss. For a month or so, I blamed him for everything. A “C” on my Econ test? Denkinger. The cute boy who didn’t call me? Denkinger. Parents weekend disaster? You-know-who.
But I was 18 and more than a little stupid. I still make a face when his name is mentioned, because the memory of the call pains me. What really hurt, though, was the team’s total meltdown in Game 7. That failure is not on Denkinger, and it never should have been.
I wonder though, how history would see the ’85 call if Denkinger and Herzog had acted with the same class that Joyce and Leyland did in the immediate aftermath. The defensive tone he offers up these days grates on me as if I were still a pissy teenager, but I get that too. There should be a statute of limitations on fan gripes. Enough already.
Well put Sars.
As an Indians fan , living in the epicentre ( yes, that’s the way we spell centre in Canada) of Tiger fan-land , ( right across the Detroit River , in Windsor Ontario Canada) It was very difficult for me to make the “That’s Baseball” argument , with out sounding like I had “my dick on” for the Tribe.
I agree with Donald , (the player who was called safe at first) he said, given the circumstance… he expected to be called out.
Joyce made a bad call , but , it would have made matters worse, if he had reversed it.
Oh, and Sars?
I am so stealing “Dick On” .
You are one of the best baseball writers of your generation.
Thanks for this.
I see a couple of problems with the state of umpiring in MLB.
Yep, there are too many out of shape umps who simply aren’t athletic enough to get in position to make the correct call (or who are too lazy to get there). That’s bad, and it doesn’t happen in other sports. In the NFL, the refs have to make weight, pass a fitness exam, etc. and if they’re not up to snuff then it really will stand for Not For Long (tm Jerry Glanville).
There are too many umps who think they’re the show out there (without having anywhere near the sense of humor of a Ron Luciano) and mess up the competition between the teams. That’s not cool either.
But MLB seems more interested in slapping around members of the second group than dealing with the first, and the way they go about it cuts very close to targeting those who are strong in the umpires union. (admittedly, the most arrogant are the big union guys – Joe West – but at the same time MLB is clearly invested in busting the umpires union completely, which makes their conduct suspect)
MLB also has the problem where they’ve given umps no incentive to do anything other than preserve their jobs. They’re so chicken-ass afraid of the player’s union (easily the most powerful in sports) that if a problem arises between player & ump, the ump is going to end up on the losing end. The commissioner’s office simply doesn’t back the umps with sufficient authority any longer, so you have the umps trying to do it on their own on the field. They say they want a faster game, but the umps can’t enforce it. And they know it, which is why Joe West bitched off. (and Yankee-Sox games are getting ridiculous; 4 hours to play a 9 inning game without tons of scoring? Come on. Mark Buehrle’s a douche, but at least he pitches a quick game.)
The replay issue isn’t an easy one. There are so many potential areas for use & abuse that that’s not going ot be easy to draw the line. HR review is relatively easy, because it’s a deadball play with extreme effects. But force plays? What about trap plays? Tags? God forbid, balls & strikes?
Amen, Sars!
I was trying to relay my admiration for the pitcher and the umpire to my friend and all he could rail on about was should the call be reversed or not!! The situation was terrible and unfortunate; the resulting classiness of everyone involved, including Cheverolet – because they didn’t have to give away a Corvette, ya know! – just made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside! I agree with Attica that their behavior should serve as a shining example of what to do in a bad situation. *Round of applause for all, including SARS*
@Josh: I dunno; I think that it might well go like the NFL. Video replay was instituted, and it was used on EVERYTHING for a while, then they decided to rein it in and set up the “challenge” rule.
Part of the problem is that baseball hasn’t got a “resource” the way that football does. In football, if you throw a challenge and the call is upheld, then you lose a time-out, and in football you often need that time-out. In baseball, it’s hard to suggest what the penalty should be for an upheld call; maybe you limit the number of pitcher swaps and throwing the challenge flag counts as one?
Buck Showalter on last night’s Baseball Tonight: “The only people I really consistently hear complain about the pace of the game is the media that has to cover the games every day and the umpires that have to umpire the games every day. Guys up in the stands for the most part aren’t complaining about the pace of the game, and Bobby [Valentine], there’s a way to do [instant replay] where it doesn’t take up that much time.”
I’m saying.
MLB might do well to take a look at how cricket has handled this issue. Umpiring and iffy calls became An Issue (bearing in mind that, in certain circumstances, bad umpiring can cause international diplomatic “incidents” in cricket), so they’ve gradually brought in a bunch of ways to deal with it.
1) Run-outs – the equivalent, I guess, of whether the batter made it to base safely or not – can be referred by the on-field umpires to the Third Umpire, which was a role *introduced* for this; the Third Umpire sits elsewhere, with access to a bunch of video replays, and if the call is at all in doubt, it goes to him, he goes over it, and the safe/out call is relayed back to the field.
2) Each team has a limited (VERY limited, but still) number of Are You Sure About That-type queries allowed, where they can ask for a given decision to be referred to the third umpire and video replays as well.
Cricket, too – a game that can take up to FIVE DAYS for a single game to play out – had people complaining endlessly about how it would Slow Down The Game, but the thing is, it doesn’t really. Arguing with the umpire in cricket is a crime sufficient to get you turfed from the match, fined, and suspended, so there were no arguments to be removed, but still.
The decision periods acquire their own special suspense, anyway, and not only does the game not get held up for long, but people *feel better about it* when games aren’t turning on *bad umpiring*.
@Abigail- “I mean really, baseball, is the Catholic Church an organization you want to emulate in glacial rate of change? ”
HA! That sums it up pretty well.
Beautifully written Sars. I’m totally for the measured expansion of replay and totally done with all the sportscasters who complain about the length of games. That said, the game has gotten slower. (Personally, I blame Chuck Knoblauch; the man was a human rain delay and now it feels like half the batters copy him.)
The pacing didn’t use to bother me until I started trying to introduce baseball to my sons (8 and 6). I’m lucky if it holds their attention for two innings (except when we’re actually at the stadium). If baseball could shrink the time between pitches, I for one would be celebrating.
My issue with instant replay is the same as Grainger’s. What resource would you use to ask the teams to “pay” for the replay? Perhaps they could, as Sami suggests, just get a certain number of requests for the replay. It would be interesting to see how that would play out in the strategy of the game. Would the number of requests be limited by game or by season? I might limit them by the season, and start over with a few more in the post-season. Taking away pitcher swap-outs might become an injury issue, in some cases?
I realized that, having asked for you to respond to this entire sobfest of a Baseball Moment, I never actually said: Thank you! So: thank you ever so much.
It’s a bit odd – almost seven months later, and I’ve pretty much forgotten about this. It helps that there have been such awesome sports moments recently (UConn women breaking the UCLA record, and the Eagles pwning the Giants in a Very Special Christmas Miracle.)
I still wonder how MLB should deal with the replay issue (and *if* they should). Perhaps one “call-it-into-question” per game? But the point you make is so true, about in-game momentum. Eesh. I have no clue.
Regardless, I eagerly await the Very Special Baseball Movie about this one. Starring Tom Selleck as Joyce, because: mustache!