What If It Isn’t Real?
Posted by Bill Baer on Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 3:58 am
Deadspin, the sports hub of the Internet, recently posted excerpts from former referee Tim Donaghy’s tell-all book, Blowing the Whistle. From the excerpts, Donaghy claims the referees held grudges against players and owners, jeopardized the integrity of the game with sophomoric prop bets, and were biased towards teams for myriad reasons. Referee Joe Crawford, for example, had a grandson who idolized Allen Iverson. Said Donaghy, “If Joe Crawford was on the court, I was pretty sure Iverson’s team would win or at least cover the spread.”
With umpiring coming into question during the 2009 MLB post-season, the obvious question must be asked: what if Major League Baseball has a seedy underbelly too?
What will you do as a fan? Will you quit watching? Will you boycott, or protest in other ways?
When I think about the fallout that the book will cause in the NBA and among its followers, I can’t help but think that it really doesn’t matter to a large percentage of us. For all the moral outrage that baseball’s performance-enhancing drug scandals have spawned, MLB hasn’t been losing any money or customers:
- MLB.com: National League, seven Clubs set all-time attendance records
- Bloomberg.com: Major League Baseball had record revenue of $6.5 billion for the 2008 regular season
The late, great George Carlin said in his 1996 HBO stand-up special Back in Town that, in the United States, sports are a distraction:
Let’s use capital punishment the same way we use sports and television in this country, to distract people and take their minds off how bad they’re being [cheated] by the upper one percent.
Even if it turns out that the umpire, who incorrectly ruled that Joe Mauer’s double in the ALDS was foul, had it in for the Twins…
Even if it turns out that the umpire, who incorrectly ruled that Kevin Youkilis didn’t apply the tag to Howie Kendrick in the ALDS, was partial to the Angels…
We will still watch, from Game 1 to Game 162, and the post-season. We will talk about the “hot stove” when it’s all done, then we’ll argue about trades that should and should not be made; free agents that should and should not be signed. We will be there for Spring Training. We will ride out the highs and lows with our favorite teams because that’s what we’re in it for, folks: the ride — like a dramatic movie (or in the case of the New York Mets: a comedy). As long as our sports achieve the goal of capturing our attention and entertaining us, we will continue to tune in on TV, radio, and the Internet; we will continue to buy tickets, merchandise, and food at the concession stands. We will continue to blog.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Basketball isn’t the only sport that has fallen victim to dishonesty. Boxing has certainly hung under a cloud of uncertainty. According to an article in The Independent from 1999, “More than 30 prizefights have been fixed or tainted with fraud in the past 12 years, according to The Miami Herald.”
More recently, UFC 104 showcased a light heavyweight championship between the undefeated Lyoto Machida and Mauricio “Shogun” Rua. Despite Rua controlling the octagon for a majority of the five-round battle, the judges ruled unanimously (48-47) that Machida was the victor. FightMetric, the FanGraphs of Mixed Martial Arts, shows that Rua was far-and-away the winner of the bout, mostly on account of landing nearly twice as many hits as his opponent. Following the fight, the Internet was very quickly populated with claims that the fight was fixed. UFC President Dana White denied the fix, but did criticize the judges over the ruling and immediately scheduled a rematch between the two fighters.
White, of course, would never flat admit that the fight was fixed. He can feign anger at the judges, but look at what he gets out of it: profit from UFC 104 due to the Machida-Rua fight, and then a rematch that is already generating a lot of buzz, which leads to more revenue. What are we — including us skeptics — going to do when that rematch is televised? We’ll tune in! Of course we will!
Aside from isolated incidents such as the 1919 Black Sox scandal and Pete Rose’s gambling issues, there hasn’t been any concrete evidence that baseball umpires have been jeopardizing the integrity of the game of baseball. Certainly with the technological advances that have taken place within the game (for instance, Questec and Pitch F/X), and with baseball’s mostly black-and-white rules, it is rather hard to skew the game one way or another discreetly. However, it would be naive to think that baseball has ever been pure, even today with today’s high definition cameras and live pitch-tracking.
The panacea, many claim, is the ubiquitous use of instant replay. Who makes conclusions based on the replays, though? The umpires! (Or referees, if you prefer.) Let’s say Joe West has it in for the Yankees in this World Series, and a controversial home run ruling is to be reviewed. Let us first realize that West is a human being, which means he is susceptible to his ego and cares greatly about what a nation of people will think about him. So he reviews the play and notices that he made a poor ruling. He still has the power to refuse to overturn his initial ruling, so he A) accomplishes his goal of slighting the Yankees and B) doesn’t have to admit fault to millions of people. Even if he’s clearly wrong, the furor will blow over in a day or two — just look at the terrible calls made this post-season and how quickly we have forgotten about most or all of them.
Maybe the other umpires will step in and make the right call. If Donaghy’s revelations are clear, it shows that the referees/umpires are closely-knit and back each other up, even if it means making a wrong ruling (or non-ruling).
There isn’t a fix for any of this. You can install oversight, but then the oversight will need oversight. And then the oversight of the oversight will need oversight. It becomes an infinite regression, and if the U.S. government is any indication, the more bureacracy you have, the harder it is to get anything done the right way in an acceptable time frame.
What do all these issues have in common? Ah — money! We can just take the profit motive out of it, right? Unfortunately, we can’t because that is the only motivation. It is a necessary evil. If franchises can’t make money, then what motivation would they have to sign or trade for better players, to upgrade their facilities, or to provide newer and better fan accomodations? If athletes can’t earn more and more money, what motivation do they have to reach the pinnacle of the sport? If referees or umpires can’t earn more money based on the perceived quality of their officiating, what motive do they have to do a good job most of the time?
The profit motive is a necessary evil, and at that, it is not necessarily an evil.
What it all boils down to is that there is no solution. If Major League Baseball is as fake as the National Basketball Association, we will just have to deal with it.
We will. We always do.
My guess is Donaghy’s claims won’t hold up too much. Often, things said by degenerate gamblers when the heat is on are loaded with a lot of crap… and trust me I know a few (and have even been accused of being one from time to time LOL).
Crawford was one of the referees of the ‘01 Finals between the Lakers and 76ers in Game 5 when the Lakers thrashed the Sixers 108-96 (hint: the Sixers didn’t cover!). It was the game that ended the Sixers season and as a Sixers’ fan it sticks in my head because of how often the whistle was blown on Philly that game and how little Iverson got to the line. Looking at the past boxscore, the Lakers went to the line 45 times compared to just 26 for the Sixers and Iverson who usually averaged double digits in free throws went just 8 times.
For an official in the NBA, the easiest way to control the game is through the calling (or not calling) of fouls. I guess Crawford’s grandson wasn’t that important that night since the Sixers were barely in the game for most of the night, largely due to the 32 free points the Lakers got at the foul line compared to 18 for the Sixers. Just think it’s odd Crawford would have a chance to influence a game that would keep his grandson’s idol’s season alive and that night the man chose to not. Don’t you?
While I understand the outrage toward what a person like Donaghy did to the game, I think it’s a little careless to call the NBA fake. Don’t you think Pete Rose was affected in his daily decision making by which bets he was going to place on his team and which ones he was not?
Same in MLB where, in the end, it might turn out that most players were juicing and the irony of it all is that for the most part, the game might have actually had a more level playing field than we assume.
I already shelled out $$$ for the Selena Roberts book this year, I’m not getting sucked into this Tim Donaghy garbage but I wonder how often refs were stuck competing with each other when their preferred players were on the court at the same time… or could it be that such a concept is too complicated for Donaghy to address since it probably didn’t happen and trashing Crawford would do enough to sell a few more copies.