Nobody would be saying anything if it wasn’t the Yankees playing…

Oh my God!  The world’s coming to an end!  The sky is falling!  A major-league umpire made a bad call.

Game 4 of the 2009 ALCS had more “bad calls” than a usual game.  I’m not going into detail about Swisher and the pick-off attempt, Swisher and the tag-up, or Cano/Posada on third.  Or at least I don’t want to.

Let me first squash the conspiracy theorists.  The Yankees have not paid off the umpire squad.  They have not bought the World Series (yet, but they’re no different than the Red Sox…again another argument for another time). 

So-called “bad calls” are bad because we, in the confines of our living rooms, enjoy a view the umpires do not have.  There’s all kinds of cameras covering a typical baseball game.  I believe the YES Network employs no less than 17 at a typical Yankees game.  Hence, we, the viewing public, can enjoy MULTIPLE camera angles showing the action from different points of view, in super-slow-motion, and if you have it, in high definition. 

Umpires, on the other hand have a very different point of view of the action.  They’re at field-level, not tens of feet above the action like the cameras up on the middle deck or the outfield, up on the backstop, or even on top of the stadium.  Sometimes where they be may not be the best angle to see what really happened.  Take Nick Swisher tagging up on third.  The instant replay showed Tim McClelland looking down the line into left field.  He’s looking for the catch, not if Swisher left the bag early or not.  It’s impossible to be looking at two things at once.  Now I know some of you will say that umpires have “blue” eyes…one blew this way, one blew that way.  But seriously…

Or here’s an every-game example.  The batter hits a ground ball to short, he fields, and fires to first.  Where’s the umpire?  He’d behind the first baseman in foul territory.  He doesn’t have the best point of view to see when the ball hits the glove.  That would be somewhere inbetween the pitcher and the first baseman.  So the umpire looks at the bag to see when the batter hits it, and listens for the snap of the ball hitting the glove, and makes the call from there.  Bottom line, he doesn’t have a clear view of the ball.  But one of the TV cameras sure does.

I challenge anybody to come off the street and do what the umpires do.  They’re pretty much on the road for the entire season, unlike the players who are home for 81 games.  The umpires are standing the entire game in the heat or the cold.  And they’re expected to be the pope.

But for the most part, we wouldn’t even know if the umpires were even making bad calls if it weren’t for all the instant replays on TV.  Now I’m not saying all these camera angles are bad for watching the game at home.  But if Major League Baseball wants to expand the instant replay beyond the current home run call, there needs to be some serious structure in place, and it needs to be used sparingly.  While the guys in the TV control trucks do an excellent job getting the replays up, many times they’re being shown while the next guy is up to bat.  While I hate limiting the number of challenges the NFL has (so the coach can’t be right a third time?), games in the playoffs are long enough as it is.  Adding an extra two or three minutes here and there can really drag things out.  It’s bad enough when they add an extra 30 second commercial after every half inning for the national games as it is.

But what we really need, not right now in the playoffs, but say next year on some random game, is the umpire cam.  Fos has buried cameras in the pitchers mound, and we’ve even had “catcher cam”.  Why not make the umpire wear that mask, so we, the great unwashed, can see exactly what the umpire sees as he’s hunching OVER the catcher so he can see the plate to call balls and strikes. 

And to further the point, how many times do you see grainy black-and-white footage from decades back, and see umpires making “bad calls”?  They had, what no more than three cameras back then?  And none of them were in the outfield.

Sure umpires have a job that people love to hate, but it’s all part of the game we all know and love, that is baseball.

Got this on twitter last night...