From the Editor: Balls, Strikes, and Gripes

Baseball is bringing in technology to solve disputed balls and strikes calls - hint: it won't. As we rely more on technology to define and defend the rules, are we giving up too much?

By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Photo by Bo Lane on Unsplash

Tuesday, Major League Baseball will host its annual All-Star Game in Atlanta. And joining the officiating crew will be … instant replay. Specifically, challenges to balls and strikes.

With teams allowed only two protests per game, it’s unlikely to be a drain on pace-of-play, which baseball has done a beautiful job of speeding up. And it will almost certainly correct a bad call or two.

So what’s the harm?

On its own, not much. But it presents an opportunity for us to take stock of what we’re giving up.

At the heart of technologies like baseball’s automated ball/strike challenge system (ABD), or tennis’ Cyclops, or the NFL’s instant replay system rests an assumption.

There should be no errors in applying the rules. The stakes are too high — a game could be lost!

The irony, of course, is that the players and the managers themselves are far from perfect.

One of the more enjoyable volunteer jobs I ever held was as a special teams coach at Riverbend High School. The sidelines on a Friday night are intense, and emotions run high. Never more so than when an official makes a call that affects the outcome of a game.

I’ve been on the winning and losing sides of those scenarios. Players learned not to complain to me when the call went against us. Nary a player or a coach was innocent of mistakes during the course of the game that, in retrospect, could have been the difference between winning and losing.

Learning to accept the outcome is a key part of not only growing up, but becoming a resilient human who can weather the storms that life brings and rise above them.

No matter how far we as a people progress, life delivers wins and loses, and oftentimes the outcomes aren’t fair.

In the world of politics, that level of unfairness has had a lot to do with recent elections.

Donald Trump has yet to have a call that went against him or his followers — be it from the Supreme Court, Congress, the Ballot Box, or the court he sat in when found guilty of 34 felonies — that he didn’t argue was “unfair.”

It’s a hopeless sense of victimization that, once it takes hold, proves next to impossible to uproot. Once one is convinced the system is stacked against you, no amount of evidence to the contrary will change minds.

Democrats are hardly immune from the same problems. Complaints that the wealthy deny opportunities and work to keep people down are a common complaint among people rightly frustrated with trying to reach the life goals that their parents were able to reach — home ownership, college educations, retirement — but are proving far more difficult for younger people to attain.

As with umpires, it’s not that Republicans’ and Democrats’ complaints lack merit. Just as umpires blow calls, courts make bad decisions, and there are many who place their own profits over the good of the community.

The challenge is determining when the balance of good and bad is out of kilter and the system needs correcting.

With umpires, it’s easy. You track their performance and fire them when the evidence shows they fall down on the job too much.

Even the best umpires, however, will continue to be accused of costing players games and missing calls (even when replays show they didn’t).

How players and managers deal with this makes and breaks careers. Do they allow the umpire’s faults — real or perceived — to keep them from achieving their goals? Or do they understand that there are multiple factors that determine the outcome of any game, and it’s rare that one bad call is the sole reason a team loses.

Much the same is true in politics. Has the system been so stacked against us — be it Democrat or Republican — that the system is out of kilter and needs a radical rework?

Or do we simply need to do a better job of learning to be resilient in the face of loss?

Voters, like players, have to answer that question for themselves.

Something to chew on Tuesday night when the ABS is used.

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