Remarkably, the television wasn’t the technology that forced the MLB’s hand on this. You would think it would…football and tennis went for challenges a long time ago, and viewers can easily see when an ump misses a call. But baseball has managed to stay human on balls and strikes for a long time.
Then along comes sports betting and they basically have no choice but to use robots.
It’s sad to me how much sports betting changes sports. When I watch, I wonder if the referee has accepted a bribe every time a call is a little funky. Considering the millions of dollars riding on every play, some of them must have taken some money at some point.
> When I watch, I wonder if the referee has accepted a bribe every time a call is a little funky.
As someone that has been a soccer (makes me throw up a little to say that word), ahem, football referee, I can tell you that not all funky calls are because the ref is rigging the game. Sometimes, you just miss stuff. Sometimes, you just see it differently. Sometimes, you just fuck up. Yes, a few have definitely admitted to taking bribes. Granted, I never was an official on anything professional. Even still, you'd make a call and the fans of the team you call a foul against all go crazy. Two minutes later, you make a call going the other way, and the other fans go nuts. I always laughed when I'd hear comments about needing glasses and "how much they pay you". You can't make 100% happy, ever. Fan is short for fanatic, and it's very appropriate.
To that end, I'm surprised that MLB never introduced replays. Cricket has replays and even have microphones that they watch the waveforms to see if there was contact or not.
I'm totally with you – 99.99% of ref calls are a legitimate attempt to arbitrate the rules and almost every mistaken call is better explained by human error than malice.
My point is the existence of the question...It's possible that someone could wager $10,000 on some player striking out and give the ump $5k for making sure the slightly-outside ball is a called strike. And with all $150,000,000,000 sloshing around sports right now, we'd be foolish to think that _never_ happens.
I have no idea how many calls are intentionally blown for money, but I'm confident it's not zero.
I just watched the replay, and I'm convinced VAR would rule it offside. So the hand of god would be irrelevant. The AR on the far side of the pitch is just out of frame at the crucial moment, so he was clearly behind the play. That's a position you never want to find yourself as an AR. I always found the AR role much more demanding than the referee. Keeping that offside line is difficult at best and nearly impossible if you're 30+ something trying to keep up with fit professional athletes in peak fitness in their 20s. Now, after that call was blown, again due to the framing, it is hard to see where the ref was looking. You can see his last position easily 30 yards from goal while Maradona makes contact about 8 yards from goal. There are at least 15 players in between the ref and the play at that point. Also, a very telling thing is that there was no conversation between the AR and the ref. On contentious plays, you'd see the ref back peddle to the AR (never take your eyes of the pitch) and have a chat about who saw what. I don't know if the ref crew had radios back in 1986, but the fact that the ref did not think it was worthy of a chat with his AR who would have had a different angle to view it says a lot about the ref's thinking. If the AR had seen it and wanted to chat with the ref, he would have stood still with his flag raised. If he felt the goal was good, he would keep his flag down and make a little run up the touchline towards midfield. The linked YT footage is cropped (pushed in I assume to remove any network branding) so the AR is out of frame. In the very last replay with the camera from behind the goal line on the near side, you can barely make out the AR but it cuts before he signals. My guess is he turned and ran up the touchline. Again, it is obvious he is out of position behind the play, so his view was more than likely blocked.
At the end of the day, if you can't absolutely positively tell that something happened, you pretty much let it stand. Just because all of the defenders raised their arms does not make it offside. There's only one person that can tell you that, and he couldn't make the call so had to let it go. There's no way the ref was going to call offside. The one thing they do teach you is that if you're unsure, make a call and make everyone think you're sure. Just own it, and move on. Never had to do that for a goal, but there's plenty of times I don't know who was last to touch the ball before it went out so you turn to the AR to get a clue. It's always fun when they shrug. You just pick on what you think you saw and just confidently rule that way. It's a damn throw, just put the ball back in play. Corners vs goal kicks are more risky, so always safe to rule for the defense with a goal kick. Never want a team to score on a bad call from a ref. Of course, none of that is ever taught to a ref...in those terms.
However, I think if you use the enhance feature to zoom into the ref's back pocket, you can see the cash he was paid to let it happen /s
Very casual football/soccer fan checking in - offside seems like a challenging call to make, most of the time. I understand the rules and all of its subtleties. It seems like the AR bears a lot of responsibility for the call - marking the penultimate defender. And yeah - if the ref just glanced at the sideline -- lack of AR flag means no offside because I didn't see it and AR didn't see it ergo there's no one left to consult ergo it didn't happen.
But yeah the objection IIUC was not over offside despite what the announcer says. He realizes at the end that it's an apparent handball. "At what point was he offside ... or was it a use of the hand that England are complaining about?"
> ... back peddle to the AR (never take your eyes of the pitch)
Is this because of the risk of violence from the players?
> Is this because of the risk of violence from the players?
that's part of it, but just in general you can't be in control if you can't see it.
> But yeah the objection IIUC was not over offside despite what the announcer says. He realizes at the end that it's an apparent handball. "At what point was he offside ... or was it a use of the hand that England are complaining about?"
wow, i wrote a whole diatribe about offside, and that had nothing to do with your comment <face-palm>
In the modern game, VAR would wind the goal scoring play to the beginning of the play to see if there was anything missed. They would look for the first reason to stop the play. In that case, the offside would be seen first and the goal would be disallowed for that.
Back then, the offside was missed by the AR so play continued. Even the England players didn't complain about the offside. They were complaining about the hand ball. It should have been the more obvious thing for a ref to see.
If you see how the players are screaming about the hand ball, it is with the hand raised over the head which does look like what every defender does to imitate the AR raising the flag. However, you see the other hand comes up to slap the wrist indicating they want the foul for handling the ball. To be fair, from the commentator's perspective, the offside was clearly visible. It's only natural to think that's what everyone would be complaining about. It is possible that even the ref was looking at his AR waiting for the flag to go up and wasn't even looking at the play and missed the hand in his befuddlement at the no offside call
To be honest, I am not sure that the hand of god play was offsides! The final touch before Maradona gets it is not clearly a "deliberate play" by the defender. Maradona is not in an offsides position on the final touch by a teammate.
I'm sure that the offside law has been "refined" between 1986 and now, but this is the law as of today and there is a huge difference between touches by teammates and defenders:
Any time someone is talking about the ref's influence on sports I get to plug one of my favorite books, Scorecasting by Moskowitz and Wertheim. The premise of the book is simple: using statistical analysis, can you prove or disprove various beliefs about sports? Several chapters are dedicated to various ways that officials influence the games that they're calling. The book does make a compelling case that they do, but in the least expected and to my mind genuinely most noble way: it seems that when officials do bend the rules, it's usually to avoid doing anything at all. In baseball, strike zones shrink on an 0-2 count because a called third strike feels like the official deciding the outcome but a swing and miss, or contact in-play, feels like the two teams playing the game and deciding the winner. In Association Foot-the-Ball, the tendency in big matches, in close matches and later on in matches isn't to call more penalties on any one team than the others, it's to penalize less overall. In matches that aren't that close or important the tendency is that the underdog will receive fewer penalties, or in blowouts the team in the lead tends to take more penalties than the team that's behind. What's really fun is that because human behavior is feedback loops that accept feedback loops as input even the appearance of bias can sometimes introduce bias. When they studied hockey they went with the assumption that, all other things being normalized for, each team should be equally likely to be the next to take a penalty. Some individual teams might be more likely than others to take a penalty, but across dozens of teams and dozens of seasons it should more or less shake out square. But it turns out that similar patterns apply: in close games, or during the playoffs fewer penalties overall but also the first strong evidence of something that hockey folk have always suspected: make-up calls. You're right, sometimes it's really close and sometimes the officials just get it wrong, and this book demonstrates statistically that after close or incorrect calls, or calls that seemed to have an inordinate effect on the game, the team that was put at a disadvantage is much more likely to be the next put at an advantage.
So yeah, officials do influence play and frankly I think it's a good and healthy thing for the sport overall when they do. In the case of balls and strikes I support automated calls because that's very simple (the ball is either in the box or not, and we can hem and haw about how we define the box during the off-season) and the infra to do it is already in-place. But in difficult, judgment-call situations (to take american football as an example, what's the actual, objectively-defined line between a corner getting handsy and defensive pass interference?) I not only think humans are necessary despite their biases but because of them. Obv bias in favor of any one team or style of play needs to be rooted out but the way that officials actually call games, even when it varies from the rules, seems to actually benefit the sport, the athletes and the fans in a lot of unexpected ways.
In weekend tournament situations where there are a lot of games to play, amateur not professional, having a game end in a draw requiring extra time or shots put a lot of pressure on keeping things on schedule. Referees are often reminded "we need winners". The obvious take away from that is to be generous with penalties. If there's something you might normally let slide, call it and avoid making the match last longer than necessary. There's no direct instruction on what to do, but as a ref that has a game ending in a draw, it might not be received well by the tournament organizers and/or the referee assigner. You might just not get another game.
For other situations of officials influencing the game, the big one is how often they use their whistle to stop play. If they are calling ticky tacky fouls, the game slows down to nothing but restarts and there's no real flow. In youth matches, parents love it when the ref protects their precious little angel. Players HATE it. A ref that players like are the ones that let the game play. If two players are both strong in their fight for the ball with some possible pulling/holding equally from both sides, let it go. Let the stronger player win. If one player obviously is using the dark arts to gain unfair advantage, sure stop the play.
As far as blow out games with the stronger team getting more penalties, it could be a much more simple explanation as the ball just spends more time in the area which raises the likelihood of a penalty occurring. A game with back and forth will see less penalties. A game where one team is putting constant pressure on the goal is much more likely for a defender to make a mistake. Just like the awarding of an own goal. They only happen because the attacking team was putting pressure where an own goal could even be possible.
>As far as blow out games with the stronger team getting more penalties, it could be a much more simple explanation as the ball just spends more time in the area which raises the likelihood of a penalty occurring
This may be specific to hockey but that's the game I care and know most about: as a rule if there's a blowout it's usually the defenders taking penalties. Whether it's a blowout because defenders are taking penalties, leading to a lot more time at a disadvantage or defenders are taking penalties because its a blowout, they're getting dominated and they can't defend without breaking the rules is difficult to tease out objectively but anecdotally it's the latter. Nobody's faster than you if you grab them by the jersey. No one is stronger than you if you trip them with your stick. You try doing it legally at first but if that doesn't work then you try getting away with doing it illegally. Whereas if you're just absolutely imposing your will on a team anyway why bother grabbing a stick that isn't lifting yours up anyway, or holding onto the jersey of someone who's already behind you? But the data reveal the opposite: the team in the lead tends to be more likely to take a penalty and the theory is that the refs just assume they can afford it and it won't affect the outcome or create an appearance of impropriety. But a tickytack holding call against a team that's already down by 3 feels like piling on at best and intentionally influencing the game at worst, and that's why officials tend to avoid it.
Taking a penalty in hockey is not the same in football. In football, it’s an actual scoring play. In hockey, it’s a time out for the player while the team reshapes to play short handed. Lots of penalty killing units go on to score.
wild how the exact same phrase means something entirely opposite depending on the sport. thanks for clearing that up, in that case I think we're in total agreement
They tried replays 50 years ago and the umpires refused to budge and so they banned them so fans couldn't know.
the above is from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Luciano 's book but wikipedia doesn't mention it. Though it was 40 years since I read the book so maybe I don't remember right?
I think it makes the game human. also football with replays on ever play is too slow.
Gambling is evil. We’ve known that in this country for hundreds of years and that’s why it’s been illegal. Gambling on smartphones is the most evil type of gambling yet invented. The only reason it’s been legalized is that it’s very profitable and the forces of profit in the government are stronger than the forces of good.
At the very least, I would hope that we could curb their ability to Advertise the same way we do with a variety of other social harms. People, kids especially, do not need to intake 35 DraftKing ads while watching a game with their family.
The ability to bet on short term individual events (such as a single pitch) means that even a single pitch, otherwise nearly inconsequential, can be abused.
How did you come to that conclusion that this is a function of betting? As a baseball fan, this feels like a long overdue feature (at least in the world of video review challenge). I think it's simply going to make the game better. MLB is losing to the NFL/NBA, and they need to put out a better product.
He oversaw the last collective bargaining agreement in 2021/22. It’s expiring this year. That’s one of the reasons why the rule change is going through now.
I won’t deny that sports betting could be a factor, but Manfred wants faster more engaging baseball. That’s been his stated goal for a long time as he worked through rule changes.
That makes absolutely no sense. If it’s a chip in the collective bargaining agreement, why would he give it away for free prior to negotiations beginning?
Why would the owners? “Good will” has never worked in MLB negotiations and I don’t see that changing.
You may be correct, but the rate of change in baseball is glacially slow compared to the other sports. One of baseball's intrinsic values is it's legacy, tradition, and history. Some may scoff at that, and I think there are good arguments against legacy/tradition as a reason to withhold change, but there are a lot of people out there that believe this. The MLB Commissioner's have largely been tasked with protecting that tradition and history.
I don't know how any baseball fan can be against this. I would bet that man has made at least one season-ending mistake on every team out there throughout his career, and he's completely unapologetic and arrogant about it. Everyone was relieved when he retired, but there's been plenty of others happy to play the king villain now.
I don't think the bribe risk is any different as its always been. Sports betting is nothing new in the U.S., people just used to either have to plan a vacation to vegas or find a bookie who would take their action. Wasn't hard to do. I knew a lot of people who had bookies and were betting every weekend. Legalization just meant they didn't have to maintain a relationship with a bookie, kind of like how dispensaries put a bunch of pot dealers out of work.
Computer usage is nothing new in the U.S., people just used to find a university or business to buy mainframe time from. Microcomputers just meant that they didn't have to maintain a relationship with a university.
It went from having to go out of your way to locate and operate with a bookie who had little away with the sports organization to... Pulling out your phone and tapping a couple of buttons, paying a legitimate business who can then apply enormous legislative and financial pressure directly against the teams with billions in backing.
It has dramatically changed the state of gambling, sports, and the businesses around them.
I'm talking about the bribe risk for a referee. It was always there. Probably even more so in the past when the mafia controlled vegas and bookies across the country.
It is almost impossible to fully remove that voice in the back of your head that will question if you were cheated. Because the fact is at the end of the day sports are played by humans and humans make mistakes, humans are susceptible to bribes, humans are susceptible to threats and there are many other factors that could influence or force cheating by players or bad calls by the officials.
There are literally countless incidents of people cheating. So my suggestion is to hope it doesn't happen but also just avoid making bets if you are not comfortable with the fact that you may lose.
We're already there. Emmanuel Clase is under investigation for fixing pitches and can't play right now.
I don't love sports betting in general, but I really hate betting on short term events like specific pitches or a strikeout. There is way too much incentive to fix.
Legal sports betting via app which turned gambling into a casual activity for hundreds of millions of new players. These apps made a market that previously placed 4 billion in bets to 125 billion. This is very new.
Their rise and market is so large that only 5% of sports bets aren't placed through one of these apps.
Legalized, league-approved sport betting is new-ish (2018). And sports betting has grown 25x since then.
Not sure if I agree with OPs take though. It might just be that baseball is a traditional, conservative game and they are hesitant to change it. maybe that's why they're just using robo umps for challenges, and not for every pitch, which would be easy to do and would further the all-about-betting theory.
Then along comes sports betting and they basically have no choice but to use robots.
It’s sad to me how much sports betting changes sports. When I watch, I wonder if the referee has accepted a bribe every time a call is a little funky. Considering the millions of dollars riding on every play, some of them must have taken some money at some point.