Wednesday, June 2, 2010

A Dream Denied: Galarraga's Perfect Game Ruined by Umpire

As if I needed more fodder to berate people who officiate/ref/umpire sports for a living.

Armando Galarraga of the Detroit Tigers pitched a perfect game tonight, but umpire Jim Joyce called Cleveland Indians batter James Donald safe on his grounder to first with two outs in the ninth -- even though he was out by a full step -- in what will go down as one of the worst calls in sports history (if you measure worst in terms of degree of significance and impact).

Terrible. Embarassing. Shameful. Egregious. Call it what you want.

Some people's reasoning might go like this: Joyce missed the call. Professional officials in every sport miss calls all the time. Thus, we shouldn't vilify Joyce more so than any other official that makes a mistake throughout the course of a game.

This logic is faulty. We can and should vilify Joyce...more than your run-of-the-mill blown call. Much more. Galarraga was one out away from a perfect game. One out away from baseball immortality. Given this, Joyce should have been mentally prepared for the situation that unfolded right before his eyes. He should have thought to himself, "Ok, if there's a close play at first, I must make sure I'm ONE HUNDRED PERCENT CERTAIN that the runner is safe in order for me to call him safe." It's just common sense.

Joyce said the right thing after the game: "I just cost that kid a perfect game. I thought he beat the throw. I was convinced he beat the throw, until I saw the replay...I don't blame them a bit or anything that was said. I would've said it myself if I had been Galarraga. I would've been the first person in my face, and he never said a word to me."

But honestly, let's not rush to laud the man for his words. If you cost a major league pitcher a perfect game, what the hell would you possibly say differently? Would you become defensive? "Oh, yeah, I might've gotten the call wrong, but screw everyone who's criticizing me." Anything other than what Joyce had said and he should've been tarred and feathered.

If I were Bud Selig, I would officially overturn the call and give Galarraga his perfect game. This wasn't a subjective judgment call, like a foul in basketball or pass interference in football. No, Joyce got the call wrong. He was solely responsible for Galarraga not getting credit for a perfect game. That's egregious.

Silver lining from this debacle: MLB will expand its use of instant replay. It has to. History shouldn't be altered the way that it was tonight, and the least we can do is learn from our mistakes. Our country's history is replete with examples of this. People have made some egregious decisions in our country's past -- some infinitely worse than what Joyce did -- but for the most part, we've been able to overcome them and have progressed as a society.

Now it's time for one of those progressions. Joyce's flagrant error has scarred our country's pastime, in plain view for all of us to see. The "purists" -- those who love talking about the necessity of preserving the game's "human element" -- must fade into the background. We need to do everything in our power to increase the accuracy of calls in professional sports. Expanding instant replay in MLB would lead us on the right path (frankly, I think replay should be heavily expanded into basketball as well since NBA refs suck so much, but out of respect to Galarraga I'll keep my focus here on baseball).

I like the idea ESPN writer Jayson Stark proposed: keep the home run replay system as is, expand it to all fair-or-foul plays, and give each team one challenge to use throughout the course of the game. The thinking behind the latter idea is that teams will be inclined to save their challenge for later in a game when it matters most, thus mitigating the potentially devastating effect of a blown call that decides the outcome of a game. Or, you know, a call that robs a pitcher of a perfect game.

I'm feeling so many emotions from this train wreck. Anger. Frustration. Sympathy (for Galarraga, not Joyce...while I consider myself a sympathetic person, I just can't find it in me to feel sympathy for a man displaying incompetence and lack of preparedness on the scale that Joyce did).

Bottom line, the system is broken. Let's fix it.

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