Ready, fire, aim!
Expanded use of replay in Major League Baseball? Be careful for what you wish, grasshopper. Knee-jerk responses cause us to look down, not beyond. Knee-jerk reactions eliminate foresight, make us see with our guts.
The problem is what more replay will bring (see: Frankenstein’s monster). There is no qualifying an “egregious umpiring error.” What’s egregious? Costing a team a game? A run? A base?
Is missing the call by 5 inches OK, but by half-a-foot unacceptable? Where do we draw such imaginary and subjective lines? With two outs in perfect games, but not in a 4-1 game in the fifth? Why should the latter game be determined, to some unknown degree, by bad calls?
MLB teams increasingly own all or part of their TV networks. You think the producers and directors in the employ of teams are going to aggressively seek then display video that can hurt “their” team, not to mention their careers? The integrity of the expanded rule will always be, at best, suspect.
But instead of making these common sense, calm-down points, Bud Selig, pretend populist, yesterday said something about appointing a committee to appoint a committee. “We represent the Lollipop League!”
NFL execs responded to shortsighted populist thinking by creating an equally shortsighted replay rule that was supposed to eliminate human error as it relates to “egregiously” bad calls. But from the start, it has rarely been used in such a manner.
In fact, armed with no data except the empirical kind, I’m sure that the NFL’s replay rule has reversed more good calls than egregiously bad ones. It has not served to eliminate human error but to underscore the human condition.
Just as the NFL’s replay rule helped steer an action-filled game into the center of slow-moving Sillyville — 20 years later, the rule is still being refined and re-defined to “iron out the kinks” — MLB’s expanded use of replay will drop the game off in some completely unintended and even dangerous place. So be careful for what you wish.
Announcer has less than Sterling reputation
Give John Sterling credit. He will do whatever it takes to remind all that he’s a self-smitten, self-serving fool. Even folks within the same radio company can’t avoid taking a swing.
Thursday, on WFAN — sibling station of WCBS, on which Sterling sorta calls Yankees games — Joe Benigno and Evan Roberts had to address the previous night’s “Turning Point of the Game” contest, that point selected by Sterling.
Although Benigno and Roberts said that in a 9-1 over Baltimore win the two-run double Nick Swisher hit in the second to make it 4-0 was the logical turning point, they reasoned that Sterling would select Robinson Cano’s home run to make it 8-1. They didn’t even have to add that he’d select that so as to feature his it’s-all-about-me, seldom correct home run call.
No more calls! Sterling’s call of Cano’s homer to make it 8-1 in the seventh, was his “(Stomach) Turning Point of the Game.” Even the day after, he’ll go out of his way to remind us he’s a full-time fool.
* If only MLB were as good to customers as the MLB Network.
Wednesday afternoon, MLBN gave us Diamondbacks-Dodgers, 1-0, LA in 14 innings, all of them called by Vin Scully, who, working solo, was as fresh at the end as at the start. But at 82, he has no excuses.
Scully instantly recognized the rarity of a pitcher, Arizona’s Edwin Jackson, catching a foul pop, then recalled the name of the man who was such a Cookie Lavagetto fan that he pinched air from balloons to make a screeching noise when Lavagetto batted for the Dodgers — in 1946.
No forced swing/pitch analysis, no forced Q&A with the color analyst, no hah-hah forced laughter, no stat-u-ration, no effort to have the audience think he’s the slickest, smartest in the land.
Gee, what a good time, Wednesday, to have sat with Vin Scully at a ballgame.
* To answer the question whether it seems as if Mike Francesa, during the Joe Girardi and Jerry Manuel paid spots on WFAN, addresses Girardi as an adult, yet speaks down to Manuel as if he’s a child: Yes, it does seem that way.
* Wednesday, Mike Greenberg of ESPN Radio’s “Mike & Mike” told us he and Mike Golic are going to “break down” the Celtics-Lakers. Merely discussing a game or a series is no longer enough for radio; you now have to “break it down,” you have to at least pretend to be an expert.
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Nick Faldo on CBS and Golf Channel remains breezy, easy, candid, downright funny. Yesterday from The Memorial on GC, after Tim Clark holed a get-outta-town 70-foot putt for eagle, Faldo said, “You hold him, I’ll slap him.”
O-Kay, here’s an apology
First, an apology. I erred, last column, when I wrote that in addition to noting that CC Sabbathia could no longer get the win when Cleveland came back from down, 10-4, Saturday, Michael Kay might’ve mentioned that Cleveland starter David Huff, hospitalized after taking a line drive to the head, could no longer get the loss.
Reader Sal Sessa — not Kay — pointed out that long before, when the Indians made it 3-3, Huff was off the hook. My bad, no excuses.
Now, a scold. When Kay lifts a chunk from a newspaper column, repeats it, almost word for word, on his radio show as if it’s his original thought — if he doesn’t credit the author or at least the publication in which it appeared — that’s dishonest, a form of theft.
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Maury Allen, synonymous with The Post’s baseball coverage from 1961 through 1988, and a sweet man eager to encourage younger writers, is seriously ill. A bunch of us would like to return that encouragement.
* Last week’s excessive revelry from the Angels’ Kendry Morales gave us a cart-off, walk-off home run. Two days later, Arizona pitcher Esmerling Vasquez gave us a balk-off, walk-off.
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Giuseppe Franco lives! What more to know about the Woody Johnson Jets than that they’re still running radio spots for PSLs, ads that holler: “These seats will not last long!” Does it not matter to the Jets that everyone, six months ago, knew this claim to be bogus?
* Baseball in the Age of Bud: After Roy Halladay’s perfect game, last week, the Marlins put un-sold tickets to that game on sale at face value. Yeah, who can ever forget not being there! Reader Josh Rosenstock: “Is it too late to get tickets to see the Beatles at Shea in 1965?”