Is this the worst blown call in recent sports memory?

I mean, seriously? I'm not even a baseball fan, but OUCH that is a bad call.

I'm told that the ump Angel Hernandez is well-known for being awful. It'll be interesting to see if there are any repercussions for this. One of the things that aggravates me about baseball is how reliant it is on human judgment when it comes down to balls/strikes and whether or not a player hits a base before the baseman catches the ball, etc. In a perfect world robots and sensors would determine all that. Football has the same issue with referees deciding how far a ball has traveled on a play seemingly at random at times, but baseball seems far more susceptible to human error over the course of a game.

Not at sports guy at all myself but that looked like a super shitty call. Even all the announcers thought it was a Home Run.

Yeah that's a bad call. I'm a strong believer in instant-replays being provided to umpires, I don't understand people's objections to them. Sure, even then the umpires can make mistakes, but this one was clearly a massive fuck up. Having said that, the umpires may have only watched it once (it seemed like a relatively short period they were off the field), even on the closer replays, you needed to see it 2 or 3 times to be certain it hit the railing.

This is why we need to embrace the Super Baseball 2020 future man! That game totally had robots who made all the calls!

@inkerman: In looking up the arguments for and against instant replays the only thing I could find in opposition is that an already long game would go on even longer and umpires fucking up calls is a part of the game. I find both arguments really fucking stupid. I'd rather have more accurate calls.

I know baseball isn't a fast paced game but they really have some pretty terrible replay systems in place, I didn't even make that full screen and it clearly hit the railing, they must be watching some tiny security tube TV to not see it. Don't know how they don't have more information available in a game where you've got things happening hundreds of feet away.

I think Hockey has it best, Sure penalties and such are still a judgement call (hell one cost the Leafs pretty badly on Monday) but there's at least 4 camera's on the net at all times including one directly above and one in the net itself, there's also many officials on and off the ice at all times making it pretty hard to miss something going on away from the action.

Should worst blown call in recent sports memory talk?

That's pretty bad. I can see messing it up on the first call, but if they actually watched the replay I don't see how they didn't rule it a homerun. At least it's an early season game so the effect on the season should be pretty much meaningless for the teams.

Just like Soccer(football), it's the old guard clinging to human officiating when computers could do a much better job.

Though, I rarely see them blow a call that obvious on review. That's nuts.

I guess you didn't see Seattle vs. Packers on Monday Night Football this past season.

Jim Joyce. . .that's all I have to say about this

It was dumb, but they did at least replay it. Umps can be some of the most bull-headed officials in sports; just how it's always been.

And the "makes the game feel longer" argument for any questionable call is legit from a business standpoint. Despite most games being done in roughly the same time as football, people constantly complain baseball being "too long;" it isn't a popular sport anymore.

I can think of 2 recent blown calls that mattered more. The one from June 2nd, 2010 that cost Galarraga a perfect game and the one from the Olympics last year that let the US Women's soccer team tie the semi final and eventually win in extra time.

There have been many obvious (and game-changing) goals that have been missed. So much so that they are now going to be implementing goal-line technology (like the Hawkeye in tennis) in some of the major upcoming tournaments.

Exactly. I'm glad they're finally trying to push through that technology. I was watching a report on that effort just last week. Here's hoping it will really make a difference.

As someone who has never ever watched, read, or heard anything about Baseball ever "A's-Indians tilt takes controversial turn in ninth" sounds like complete and utter nonsense to me. I kow the meaning of every single word but this constellation makes little sense.

That sucks for the A's. This call is as bad as that one call in the Packers-Seahawks football game last year where the refs gave the Seahawks a pass touchdown in the final seconds when the ball was actually intercepted by the Packers.

@mosespippy: I think the Galarraga call was the worst one in recent memory and will be for awhile. The Ump instantly knew what he did and it was good to see them together after trying to laugh about it...but man...that call sucked.

I've seen worse calls in professional sports but that's up there with them.

@rorie: You'd be surprised by how right they are on Balls and Strikes and the bang bang plays at second and first base. I think ESPN did a study few years back and they found them to be on the money the vast majority of the time.

Blown calls are part of what makes sports so much fun to watch. Without the terrible call it would have been just another at bat in a season full of home runs. Now its a thing that can be argued about on bar stools for a long time.

The Galarraga call is a perfect example. All the stuff that went down after the blown call was just as interesting as watching the perfect game. (But as a die hard Tigers fan, holy shit was I pissed when I watched it happen.)

I felt so sorry for Galarraga because that no-hitter was all he was going to have in his professional career. He's been in-and-out of the minors since.

I was thinking the same thing. Even as a Hawks fan I thought it was a major blown call. Should have been a Packers win.

This one is still pretty bad, but at least it helped get the real referees back on the field!

That had playoff implications too.

Try being a Lions fan. Besides the general awfulness of just being a Lions fan, the past two years they've had two touchdowns taken away by rules that were immediately changed the next season.

I heard the MLB is against using technology to make calls because they're afraid they'll lose the spirit of the game if everything becomes entirely rote. Which I agree with, because if it weren't for calls like these, people would have a lot less to talk about and the game would feel much more mechanical.

But I'm not a sports guy so I don't care if one team loses imaginary points over another, which would of course peeve a lot of people.

I enjoyed the montage the most of every commentator going "I think that hit the railing" "yah you're right..thats definitely a home run"

Hawks vs. Packers was a pretty bad call and I'm a Hawks fan.

Reminds me of this.

I don't remember who the player who is offside by a mile is but he did score on that play.

With the technology the way it is, would it be so hard to throw the ump an iPad here and there to watch an instant replay. He wouldn't even have to visit a TV, and the game wouldn't be slowed down too long. Or give him a walkie and have him chat with a referee in the back with all the monitors, let him make the call.

It was a horrible call but certainly not the worst that we've seen, even this season. Watch this call that ended the game and stick around for the Rays radio announcers losing their minds.

It's pretty bad. What sort of replay equipment do the umpires have? Were they able to slow the play down? I ask because I'm having a hard time understanding how they could have fucked up so badly.

Well it has to be the Seahawks-Packers game call. Worst call I've seen in football.

I heard a guy talking about a book he wrote about corruption in sports. He said that the number of World Series that have gone to game seven is very highly statistically improbable without officials cheating on calls.

CB Bucknor, Joe West, Angel Hernandez, and "Balkin'" Bob Davidson. If you know any of these umpires names you know them for the wrong reason. It is sad that when I saw the name Angel Hernandez that I knew it was going to be a blatantly bad call.

As a huge Indian's fan, I must say I enjoyed it. Although yes, it was bullshit. Go Indians!

yes. But also I'm still mad when that little fuck Jeffery Maier stole the ball away from Tony Tarasco in the Orioles Yankees ALCS in 96, and the Umps called it a home-run.

I hope that never happens it would literally ruin the game by extending it out an hour, especially balls and strikes. People already complain about baseball being slow.

That human error and subjectivity is part of what makes the game great. There is this recent obsession some fans seem to have with getting the calls "right" brought on by Football's instant replay system, I think that's misguided as baseball is game is mental chess match of constant adjustments. Figuring out how the umpire calls the zone is a skill all good major leaguers have. You take that aspect out of the game it becomes less human, less intellectually deep, less interesting to watch and frankly less dramatic.

I don't care if they are 100% right as long as they are consistent in how they call the game and zone (and are right enough within reason). Baseball is entertainment it's not the judicial system.

plus they already have replay available for homeruns, but that doesn't help when you have a bad ump leading the crew. If there is any real problem in Major League baseball is that they have a hard time getting rid of washed up or bad umps due to union contracts.

Angel Hernandez did a bad job and should get held accountable, but let's not take the fun out of the game to prevent that from happening again.

It was a really shitty call and Angel Hernandez has been a terrible umpire for years.

dont forget that infield fly rule fiasco in that wild card game with Atlanta VS St. Louis.

Don't care if it made for one of the best human moments in all of sports. Jim Joyce ruining Armando Galarraga's perfect game is one of the worst calls of all time.

@renmckormack: bad memories. Goddamn Yankees. The worst thing now is that the Orioles have been bad for so long that every time you go to the stadium, three quarters of the fans are Yankee fans who drive down for cheap tickets rather than pay 300 bucks to bring the family out to Yankee Stadium.

That one is made far worse by the fact that Jim Joyce is one of the best umpires in baseball. He is very consistent in getting his calls correct, but that one call will always be a high profile blemish on his career.

Baseball fans' insistence on not using instant replay still just seems so misguided. The two common reasons that always come up have already been mentioned in this thread and they both still read like complete bullshit.

I still don't quite understand what happened. Was it supposed to be a home run? My baseball knowledge is non existent.

As long as the ball hit somewhere above the yellow line on the fence it was a home run, which would have tied the game at 4-4. Unfortunately the umpires incorrectly said that it didn't hit above the line, when the replays clearly showed that it hit the metal fence above the line. They even had the benefit of using the same replays that we had, and still got the call wrong.

I don't watch sports, but this thread has been interesting.

No blown calls in eSports :D