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> When I watch, I wonder if the referee has accepted a bribe every time a call is a little funky. As someone that has been a soccer (makes me throw up a little

> When I watch, I wonder if the referee has accepted a bribe every time a call is a little funky. As someone that has been a soccer (makes me throw up a little to say that word), ahem, football referee, I can tell you that not all funky calls are because the ref is rigging the game. Sometimes, you just miss stuff. Sometimes, you just see it differently. Sometimes, you just fuck up. Yes, a few have definitely admitted to taking bribes. Granted, I never was an official on anything professional. Even still, you'd make a call and the fans of the team you call a foul against all go crazy. Two minutes later, you make a call going the other way, and the other fans go nuts. I always laughed when I'd hear comments about needing glasses and "how much they pay you". You can't make 100% happy, ever. Fan is short for fanatic, and it's very appropriate. To that end, I'm surprised that MLB never introduced replays. Cricket has replays and even have microphones that they watch the waveforms to see if there was contact or not.

comex 1y ago
They already did introduce replays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_replay_in_Major_League_Baseball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_replay_in_Major_League... But replays weren’t allowed for balls and strikes, the subject of the new system.
bluGill 1y ago
They tried replays 50 years ago and the umpires refused to budge and so they banned them so fans couldn't know. the above is from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Luciano https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Luciano 's book but wikipedia doesn't mention it. Though it was 40 years since I read the book so maybe I don't remember right? I think it makes the game human. also football with replays on ever play is too slow.
nxobject 1y ago
I've always wanted to ask an actual ref (fans are a dime a dozen)... what would have been your takeaway from how Maradona's Hand of God was called?
- dylan604 1y ago
  For those unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ccNkksrfls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ccNkksrfls I just watched the replay, and I'm convinced VAR would rule it offside. So the hand of god would be irrelevant. The AR on the far side of the pitch is just out of frame at the crucial moment, so he was clearly behind the play. That's a position you never want to find yourself as an AR. I always found the AR role much more demanding than the referee. Keeping that offside line is difficult at best and nearly impossible if you're 30+ something trying to keep up with fit professional athletes in peak fitness in their 20s. Now, after that call was blown, again due to the framing, it is hard to see where the ref was looking. You can see his last position easily 30 yards from goal while Maradona makes contact about 8 yards from goal. There are at least 15 players in between the ref and the play at that point. Also, a very telling thing is that there was no conversation between the AR and the ref. On contentious plays, you'd see the ref back peddle to the AR (never take your eyes of the pitch) and have a chat about who saw what. I don't know if the ref crew had radios back in 1986, but the fact that the ref did not think it was worthy of a chat with his AR who would have had a different angle to view it says a lot about the ref's thinking. If the AR had seen it and wanted to chat with the ref, he would have stood still with his flag raised. If he felt the goal was good, he would keep his flag down and make a little run up the touchline towards midfield. The linked YT footage is cropped (pushed in I assume to remove any network branding) so the AR is out of frame. In the very last replay with the camera from behind the goal line on the near side, you can barely make out the AR but it cuts before he signals. My guess is he turned and ran up the touchline. Again, it is obvious he is out of position behind the play, so his view was more than likely blocked. At the end of the day, if you can't absolutely positively tell that something happened, you pretty much let it stand. Just because all of the defenders raised their arms does not make it offside. There's only one person that can tell you that, and he couldn't make the call so had to let it go. There's no way the ref was going to call offside. The one thing they do teach you is that if you're unsure, make a call and make everyone think you're sure. Just own it, and move on. Never had to do that for a goal, but there's plenty of times I don't know who was last to touch the ball before it went out so you turn to the AR to get a clue. It's always fun when they shrug. You just pick on what you think you saw and just confidently rule that way. It's a damn throw, just put the ball back in play. Corners vs goal kicks are more risky, so always safe to rule for the defense with a goal kick. Never want a team to score on a bad call from a ref. Of course, none of that is ever taught to a ref...in those terms. However, I think if you use the enhance feature to zoom into the ref's back pocket, you can see the cash he was paid to let it happen /s
iambateman 1y ago
I'm totally with you – 99.99% of ref calls are a legitimate attempt to arbitrate the rules and almost every mistaken call is better explained by human error than malice. My point is the existence of the question...It's possible that someone could wager $10,000 on some player striking out and give the ump $5k for making sure the slightly-outside ball is a called strike. And with all $150,000,000,000 sloshing around sports right now, we'd be foolish to think that _never_ happens. I have no idea how many calls are intentionally blown for money, but I'm confident it's not zero.
ratelimitsteve 1y ago
Any time someone is talking about the ref's influence on sports I get to plug one of my favorite books, Scorecasting by Moskowitz and Wertheim. The premise of the book is simple: using statistical analysis, can you prove or disprove various beliefs about sports? Several chapters are dedicated to various ways that officials influence the games that they're calling. The book does make a compelling case that they do, but in the least expected and to my mind genuinely most noble way: it seems that when officials do bend the rules, it's usually to avoid doing anything at all. In baseball, strike zones shrink on an 0-2 count because a called third strike feels like the official deciding the outcome but a swing and miss, or contact in-play, feels like the two teams playing the game and deciding the winner. In Association Foot-the-Ball, the tendency in big matches, in close matches and later on in matches isn't to call more penalties on any one team than the others, it's to penalize less overall. In matches that aren't that close or important the tendency is that the underdog will receive fewer penalties, or in blowouts the team in the lead tends to take more penalties than the team that's behind. What's really fun is that because human behavior is feedback loops that accept feedback loops as input even the appearance of bias can sometimes introduce bias. When they studied hockey they went with the assumption that, all other things being normalized for, each team should be equally likely to be the next to take a penalty. Some individual teams might be more likely than others to take a penalty, but across dozens of teams and dozens of seasons it should more or less shake out square. But it turns out that similar patterns apply: in close games, or during the playoffs fewer penalties overall but also the first strong evidence of something that hockey folk have always suspected: make-up calls. You're right, sometimes it's really close and sometimes the officials just get it wrong, and this book demonstrates statistically that after close or incorrect calls, or calls that seemed to have an inordinate effect on the game, the team that was put at a disadvantage is much more likely to be the next put at an advantage. So yeah, officials do influence play and frankly I think it's a good and healthy thing for the sport overall when they do. In the case of balls and strikes I support automated calls because that's very simple (the ball is either in the box or not, and we can hem and haw about how we define the box during the off-season) and the infra to do it is already in-place. But in difficult, judgment-call situations (to take american football as an example, what's the actual, objectively-defined line between a corner getting handsy and defensive pass interference?) I not only think humans are necessary despite their biases but because of them. Obv bias in favor of any one team or style of play needs to be rooted out but the way that officials actually call games, even when it varies from the rules, seems to actually benefit the sport, the athletes and the fans in a lot of unexpected ways.

comex 1y ago

They already did introduce replays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_replay_in_Major_League_Baseball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_replay_in_Major_League... But replays weren’t allowed for balls and strikes, the subject of the new system.

bluGill 1y ago

They tried replays 50 years ago and the umpires refused to budge and so they banned them so fans couldn't know. the above is from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Luciano https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Luciano 's book but wikipedia doesn't mention it. Though it was 40 years since I read the book so maybe I don't remember right? I think it makes the game human. also football with replays on ever play is too slow.

nxobject 1y ago

I've always wanted to ask an actual ref (fans are a dime a dozen)... what would have been your takeaway from how Maradona's Hand of God was called?

dylan604 1y ago
For those unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ccNkksrfls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ccNkksrfls I just watched the replay, and I'm convinced VAR would rule it offside. So the hand of god would be irrelevant. The AR on the far side of the pitch is just out of frame at the crucial moment, so he was clearly behind the play. That's a position you never want to find yourself as an AR. I always found the AR role much more demanding than the referee. Keeping that offside line is difficult at best and nearly impossible if you're 30+ something trying to keep up with fit professional athletes in peak fitness in their 20s. Now, after that call was blown, again due to the framing, it is hard to see where the ref was looking. You can see his last position easily 30 yards from goal while Maradona makes contact about 8 yards from goal. There are at least 15 players in between the ref and the play at that point. Also, a very telling thing is that there was no conversation between the AR and the ref. On contentious plays, you'd see the ref back peddle to the AR (never take your eyes of the pitch) and have a chat about who saw what. I don't know if the ref crew had radios back in 1986, but the fact that the ref did not think it was worthy of a chat with his AR who would have had a different angle to view it says a lot about the ref's thinking. If the AR had seen it and wanted to chat with the ref, he would have stood still with his flag raised. If he felt the goal was good, he would keep his flag down and make a little run up the touchline towards midfield. The linked YT footage is cropped (pushed in I assume to remove any network branding) so the AR is out of frame. In the very last replay with the camera from behind the goal line on the near side, you can barely make out the AR but it cuts before he signals. My guess is he turned and ran up the touchline. Again, it is obvious he is out of position behind the play, so his view was more than likely blocked. At the end of the day, if you can't absolutely positively tell that something happened, you pretty much let it stand. Just because all of the defenders raised their arms does not make it offside. There's only one person that can tell you that, and he couldn't make the call so had to let it go. There's no way the ref was going to call offside. The one thing they do teach you is that if you're unsure, make a call and make everyone think you're sure. Just own it, and move on. Never had to do that for a goal, but there's plenty of times I don't know who was last to touch the ball before it went out so you turn to the AR to get a clue. It's always fun when they shrug. You just pick on what you think you saw and just confidently rule that way. It's a damn throw, just put the ball back in play. Corners vs goal kicks are more risky, so always safe to rule for the defense with a goal kick. Never want a team to score on a bad call from a ref. Of course, none of that is ever taught to a ref...in those terms. However, I think if you use the enhance feature to zoom into the ref's back pocket, you can see the cash he was paid to let it happen /s

iambateman 1y ago

I'm totally with you – 99.99% of ref calls are a legitimate attempt to arbitrate the rules and almost every mistaken call is better explained by human error than malice. My point is the existence of the question...It's possible that someone could wager $10,000 on some player striking out and give the ump $5k for making sure the slightly-outside ball is a called strike. And with all $150,000,000,000 sloshing around sports right now, we'd be foolish to think that _never_ happens. I have no idea how many calls are intentionally blown for money, but I'm confident it's not zero.

ratelimitsteve 1y ago

Any time someone is talking about the ref's influence on sports I get to plug one of my favorite books, Scorecasting by Moskowitz and Wertheim. The premise of the book is simple: using statistical analysis, can you prove or disprove various beliefs about sports? Several chapters are dedicated to various ways that officials influence the games that they're calling. The book does make a compelling case that they do, but in the least expected and to my mind genuinely most noble way: it seems that when officials do bend the rules, it's usually to avoid doing anything at all. In baseball, strike zones shrink on an 0-2 count because a called third strike feels like the official deciding the outcome but a swing and miss, or contact in-play, feels like the two teams playing the game and deciding the winner. In Association Foot-the-Ball, the tendency in big matches, in close matches and later on in matches isn't to call more penalties on any one team than the others, it's to penalize less overall. In matches that aren't that close or important the tendency is that the underdog will receive fewer penalties, or in blowouts the team in the lead tends to take more penalties than the team that's behind. What's really fun is that because human behavior is feedback loops that accept feedback loops as input even the appearance of bias can sometimes introduce bias. When they studied hockey they went with the assumption that, all other things being normalized for, each team should be equally likely to be the next to take a penalty. Some individual teams might be more likely than others to take a penalty, but across dozens of teams and dozens of seasons it should more or less shake out square. But it turns out that similar patterns apply: in close games, or during the playoffs fewer penalties overall but also the first strong evidence of something that hockey folk have always suspected: make-up calls. You're right, sometimes it's really close and sometimes the officials just get it wrong, and this book demonstrates statistically that after close or incorrect calls, or calls that seemed to have an inordinate effect on the game, the team that was put at a disadvantage is much more likely to be the next put at an advantage. So yeah, officials do influence play and frankly I think it's a good and healthy thing for the sport overall when they do. In the case of balls and strikes I support automated calls because that's very simple (the ball is either in the box or not, and we can hem and haw about how we define the box during the off-season) and the infra to do it is already in-place. But in difficult, judgment-call situations (to take american football as an example, what's the actual, objectively-defined line between a corner getting handsy and defensive pass interference?) I not only think humans are necessary despite their biases but because of them. Obv bias in favor of any one team or style of play needs to be rooted out but the way that officials actually call games, even when it varies from the rules, seems to actually benefit the sport, the athletes and the fans in a lot of unexpected ways.