MAR Competitions

[jds2001]

I've been debating whether to respond to this, but I'm going to make one response and that's it.

I was a ref at Mt. Olive. This game is HARD, the sightlines are bad, and we're human. I'm also of the opinion that video replay ruined baseball, and if you think professional umpires get it right all the time, I've got news for you.

However, what made my weekend was when a student came up to me, and said "thanks for the hand signals on the sally port, that really helped". Made my day that someone appreciated what I was doing, knows how hard it is (no video replay is going to be able to get the multiple angles that you have to look to tell a valid crossing), and took the time to tell me so.

What really gets me down is when someone starts a thread like this, with apparently zero knowledge about how it's done, and then expects us to be perfect. We're all human, we make mistakes. However, since the rules do not allow us to look at video (and I would not be in favor of a change to this), we have to accept the mistakes, as Galarraga graciously did. Nobody's perfect.