You Make the Call

Recent discussions about instant replay in baseball have made me realize the error of my ways. Sports don't need replay. Human error by the officials is just part of the game. So, I've come up with an ingenious promotion to increase fan involvement in the games. Perhaps, we could use it to raise money for charity as well.

My proposal is that half the officiating crew for each game is made up of actual officials and that the other half are selected in some fashion (randomly among ticket holders who apply at least 30 minutes before a given game, highest bidder in an on-line auction the day of the game with the proceeds going to charity, etc.). I realize basketball games use 3 officials currently, but I'd implement 4 officials for NBA games. An extra set of eyes can't hurt, right? Maybe the extra official would notice that Paul Pierce traveled egregiously before drawing contact on his 4-point play last night. The funny thing is that he did a very similar thing (traveled and drew contact from an airborne defender) against the Pistons and he got called for an offensive foul. No fouls should have been called because he traveled on both occasions! But, I digress.

The positions would rotate game by game and the current number of officials should stay employed. The official officials would serve as backups in case something happened to any of the guest officials during action. So, every other game, we'd have an untrained umpire behind home plate in baseball games. Yeah, he (or she) might miss a few calls, but the trained umps currently employed miss calls too. Hopefully, the guest umps would be fairly consistent with their calls. If not, then we'll just have awkward arguments between players and fans and a little more human error than we're accustomed to.

This new system might also introduce a new wrinkle in home field advantage. But, in the end, it should equal out like the DH/pitcher hitting is supposed to even out in MLB interleague play. Teams do some ridiculous things to gain advantages (long grass at Notre Dame Stadium) and the current officials are far from infallible - there are numerous examples from college football officiating and replay to draw on for this one (see OU at UO).

I'm anticipating that Roger Goodell will rush to implement this for the upcoming football season and Bud Selig will be close behind (he might even want to test it in the playoffs this fall!). The NHL will jump at the opportunity to try to draw in extra fans with the promotion and David Stern has to view Average Joe as an upgrade over Tim Donaghy.

Obviously, I'm not really advocating this ridiculous idea. There is a reason that HS officials don't generally work professional games. They aren't good enough. The officials that work in MLB, the NBA, the NHL and the NFL are, generally, the best at what they do. So, if the leagues go through the trouble to screen officials and review officials because they want the very best officials (because better officials have less human error - remember, officials aren't there to have an impact on the game, they are there to officiate), why not use technology if can further reduce human error in a timely fashion? Tennis does it. Why don't the other sports investigate more progressive ways they can improve the overall officiating of games?