Today’s Quick Misses installment pays tribute to Sean Barber, an International League umpire getting a chance to take a turn in the majors this first week of the season. The Lose knows that umpiring is a thankless task and that the men in blue generally do a excellent job. The Lose appreciates that MLB gives up-and-coming talent behind the plate a chance to work in the bigs and get a feel for it just as the players get. And the Lose also knows that umpires can have an off night. Sean Barber, however, had maybe the worst night I’ve seen behind the plate since Game 5 of the 1997 NLCS, when Eric Gregg had a strike zone wider than the state of Delaware. In the A’s 3-2 win over Seattle in 12 innings in Oakland on Thursday night, there were 363 pitches thrown, 136 of which were either balls in play or swinging strikes. Of the remaining 227 pitches thrown, Pitch F/X data reveals that Barber missed the call on anywhere from 32-50 of them (depending on which method you use to count them – yes, there are more than one). For a top calibre umpire at the game’s highest level, missing 14-22% of the calls is ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE. And given that the home teams get the lion’s share of the breaks from the officials, it’s no surprise which team wasn’t particularly happy about how this went:
To the Buzzard Points!
• It took all of two days for one of what will likely be many worst-case scenarios turned up in the MLB replay experiment. The Giants thought they had picked off an Arizona Diamondbacks runner at 1st base on Tuesday night, the umpire ruled otherwise and Giants manager Bruce Bochy challenged the play. Replays proved inconclusive – it was one of those plays which was so close that that, had the original call gone the other way and Snakes manager Kirk Gibson been doing the challenging, it still would have been difficult to overturn. You could argue it either way and not be wrong. Only a handful of pitches later, however, there was a close play at the plate but the Snakes runner was clearly out and the home plate umpire blew the call – but since the Giants had used their challenge and lost it on the pick-off play at first, they couldn’t challenge the play. This is not how the system is supposed to work. The goal is to get the calls correct. But the system constructed in the offseason was rigged to suit the needs of a number of special interests – umpires, managers, and the like, all of whom are territorial and touchy and somewhat clannish in their behaviours – and likely will wind up serving no one particularly well. For example, it seems like a no-brainer to me that a scoring play and/or a play at the plate should be subjected to the same sort of overarching review as a home run – runs count the same no matter how they are scored, after all, and scoring plays are the most important plays in the game. The system is in flux and there is bound to be a slice of Swiss cheese’s worth of holes discovered in it as the season progresses, but I do think it will improve here over time. A large part of MLB’s movement into the high-tech world involves hand-holding the umpires, who don’t like their authority being so scrutinized. C’mon blue, it’s not personal. The more resources at your disposal to get the calls right, the more you will get right and the less scrutiny you’ll ultimately be subjected to.
• The Oakland A’s had a rainout Tuesday for the first time in something like 16 years. We should be in the dry season here in California, but the weather is all over the place this year. Last night, however, they had a dumbout. For some inexplicable reason, the grounds crew at the O.co
• The A’s, of course, have managed to parlay their woes into a certain amount of hipster indie cred, thanks to Moneyball and such, but I find that act has worn pretty thin by now. While I find it impressive that they do more with less when it comes to talent and resources, the fact is that they have ultimately accomplished not much of anything. They came a lot closer to winning an Oscar for Best Picture than they have come to winning a World Series. Take their same systematic and statistical approach and add in an actual budget, and you have the 3-time World Series winning Boston Red Sox. It is still a big money game. Quite frankly, I think the A’s success of the past few years has come in spite of their own ownership, which was hell-bent on stripping the payroll down and making them look like the ultimate charity case so as to force MLB to act on their San Jose plans. I do not find that quaint nor charming in the slightest, although I commend the players for playing through it and excelling.
• I am happy baseball is back. So much lose! 2,430 losses per season, minus a few games which will be rained out in places like Minnesota and at Wrigley Field which will not be made up. The Lose is inclined to think that the Washington Nationals will have a big season. The Nationals were sentenced by the baseball gods to 1 year of bad Karma after their idiotic decision in 2012 to shut down Stephen Strasburg late in the season with a team that was the best in baseball and clearly the favourite to win the World Series, but I would like to think the franchise has now learned from that enormous mistake. I have no idea who will win in the AL, so I will throw my support behind the Indians, since I think they are going to be pretty good and Cleveland can always use some love.
• I am pleased with the fast starts by my favourite sides – as of this writing, the Giants are 4-1, the Mariners 3-1 – but some caution must be exercised because the early opposition was substandard, at best. The Giants beat up on Arizona, who are 1-6 now, decimated with pitching injuries, and have the look of being truly awful. The Mariners mauled the
• And, of course, a new baseball season means the clownshoes that are the Houston Astros are at it again. Never change, Astros. You are the gift that keeps on giving.
• A part of why I made a point to write about the Philadelphia 26ers when I did is because I really didn’t think the streak would reach 27, simply because the 26ers were playing Detroit in that 27th game, and the Pistons are involved in an even more contemptible sort of tanking here at the end of the season: that in which you tank to protect a draft pick. Detroit dumbly traded away their first round pick in the 2014 draft. The Pistons gave up their pick along with Ben Gordon to Charlotte in exchange for Corey Magette’s expiring contract back in 2012, but the pick is protected. The NBA allows teams to include provisions in trades where they don’t have to surrender a pick if it is high enough in the draft – in this case, if the pick lands in the Top 8. And once it became apparent that the Pistons season was a lost cause, they started going about doing everything they can to preserve that pick, losing 18 out of their last 23, because what incentive do they have otherwise? The Warriors did this exact same thing three years ago, going so far as to start five rookies in the hopes they would lose out and hold onto a pick they’d stupidly given up in a bad trade. Clearly, the solution to all your problems is to just be deliberately terrible rather than own up to your own mistakes. The NBA has implemented a number of these sorts of mechanisms over the years so as to somewhat insulate clubs from their own incompetence (the Amnesty Clause being another one), which is a notion I find problematic. It’s tough to see such a franchise like the Detroit Pistons completely disintegrate, as it was really a model franchise in its professionalism and the way it conducted itself – a fact which masqued some of the deficiencies when it comes to talent evaluation in the front office, where GM Joe Dumars has been hit-and-miss over the years. (Taking Darko Milicic over Carmelo Anthony? Really?) Dumars is almost certainly done in Detroit, as they will finish cleaning house and start all over again.
• I have no real interest in the Final Four, which takes place 3 hours from now. None of the teams appeal to me very much, though I should mention that the Kentucky-Wichita State game two weeks ago was a great game and far more worthy of being an NCAA final than what we are likely to see. (Which should also tell you who I am inclined to think will win out here over the weekend.) I do have to say that I possess a curious opinion about Kentucky coach John Calipari, a Cheshire Cat who managed to slip away from two programs – Massachusetts and Memphis – just before they were hammered by the NCAA. Both were forced to vacate trips to the Final Four, which occurred on Calipari’s watch, yet he somehow emerged unscathed. Now, it could argued that the NCAA and its rules are dumb. I will gladly make that argument. But the rules are the rules, whether you like them or not. College basketball coaches are sort of like congress, in that you know the institution is corrupt and contemptible yet think your local guy is swell. The fact is that a great number of college basketball coaches – not all, mind you – care pretty much only about themselves and could not give a shit about the supposed mission of the universities that they work for. It does not matter at all whether or not the kids actually, you know, go to class or anything – and now that the NBA has instituted the rules mandating kids go to college for a year, there is less incentive than ever for the likes of Calipari to care, since the NBA has essentially stated what we all should have stated years ago, which is that the whole notion of the collegiate student-athlete in this country is basically a joke. Calipari has simply gone about recruiting every one-and-done player he can find to come and spend a year at Kentucky and then get out of here and play in the pros. He no longer has to even make a pretense of caring about the rules, since the team turns over every year. As such, he has gone from seeming dishonest to being about the most honest guy in the whole profession, which is quite a turnaround.
• The Lose could not help but giggle at news of this hire.
• College sports in America is about to start getting more honest, I suspect. Earlier this week, an arbiter from the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago upheld the right of Northwestern University football players to unionize. It is a very, very narrow ruling and one which is going to be subject to a zillion appeals from the school and the NCAA, but the arbiter stated, in a nutshell, that the football team at Northwestern were not ‘student athletes’ so much as unpaid workers. As such, the players should be entitled to form a union and engage in various collective bargaining acts with the school – not just over possibly being paid, but also lengths of work weeks and insurance and all of that other stuff. This is only one isolated case of many pending against the NCAA, a sham of an organization which is eventually going to get its just desserts, but this one is potentially quite a game changer – although maybe not in the way some experts are thinking of. For example, this ruling applies only to a private institution in suburban Chicago, but not to a state institution like the University of Illinois in Champaign. OK, so, what happens if Northwestern players unionize and have to hammer out a deal with the school? Well, it may be a little bit awkward at first, but if the school and the players reach some sort of an agreement, the players at Northwestern will be much better off, overall, than they would be at another school – which, of course, a savvy coach would then use as a pretty good recruiting tool. It has been suggested many that universities fully embraced integration in the 1960s only when some powerhouses came to realize they were no longer going to be able to compete on the playing field unless they started recruiting black players. Texas Western (which is now UTEP) and Sam “Bam” Cunningham affected the most change, in the end, simply by playing the games better than all-white opponents could do. It may not have been the right reason for integration, and may have been entirely self-serving, but the right result was nevertheless achieved. It seems to me that if the big private institutions in the NCAA – Notre Dame, Duke, Northwestern, Stanford, USC and such – were forced to comply with orders to collectively bargain with their student athletes, those programs would eventually become extremely appealing to prospective athletes – even more than they already are – and other institutions could possibly be forced to offer the same sorts of benefits simply out of the need to compete. I could be wrong on this, but it is an intriguing notion to ponder. I have been waiting for years for someone to find the right needle which will pop the bloated balloon that is the NCAA. It is nothing if not an opportunistic entity however, and I am curious to see how it will go about attempting to change its spots, especially since I am of the opinion that, when the O’Bannon v. NCAA case finally sees the light of day, the NCAA is going to lose and lose big. I am not a lawyer, of course, nor do I play one on TV. The players at Northwestern are apparently going to have a secret ballot vote on April 25, and their coach, Pat Fitzgerald, has come out against this move for reasons which sound decidedly self-serving and lame. My hope is that they vote to do so and push the envelope.
• God, my soccer team sucks. At least the players had the class to make this gesture to the Yellow Army faithful after last weekend’s 0:3 shit show in Swansea. It is not looking good for The Good Guys. If they avoid relegation, it will be a damn miracle. On the Ball City! Oh, fuck it, just win a damn game already.
