Machinery Game Needs Is Honesty

Americans are a people who love their machines. Where else would you find groups who would climb confidently into what amounts to a giant tin can and trust it to take you to the moon and back? Where else would you find guys who would climb into roofless, window-less 250-m.p.h. machines and go careening around a 2 1/2-mile closed course inside concrete fences and expect to get home in one piece?

Nobody in the history of the world had more faith in valves and rivets and dials and wires and instruments. I had a friend once, Big Ed Sullivan, who used to bomb the Ploesti oilfields in World War II, sometimes flying through thick smoke which made visibility zero. “Weren’t you scared, flying blind in flak?” I asked him. “We were on instruments. Your instruments are better than you are,” he explained.

That’s the American credo. Your instruments are better than you are. It galls Americans to rely on human limitations. If it weren’t this way, there wouldn’t be airplanes, steamboats, phonographs, moving pictures.

So, when a World Series is apparently decided, as two of the last three seem to have been in critical games, by umpires’ decisions that seem to be wrong, Americans get cranky. They yearn to get out the screwdrivers and pliers and blueprints. They want to fix it. They want to bring in the machines.

Is Instant Replay an idea whose time has come? Are umpires obsolete? Should Big Brother be running the games?

Well, in the first place, 95% (or more) of all umpires’ decisions are correct. In fact, 95% of all decisions in the field are self-evident. You can tell the right call from the cheap seats.

But is that enough? The Los Angeles hood, Mickey Cohen, once complained to me that he should be left alone by the cops because “95% of my business is legitimate.” It’s that other 5% that rocked the city.

The problem with government-by-machine is, you’re going to take an already-slow game and make it infinitely slower. Machines have not been spectacularly successful in adjudicating football disputes. The machine that tells you when the net cord has been hit by a serve in tennis is something less than infallible.

The real problem with baseball--as indeed with football, tennis and a half-dozen other sports--is that it’s not self-policed. If we are a people who love machines, we are a people who hate authority. Authority is something to be circumvented, outwitted. We are descendants of people who came here to escape malignant authority and our mistrust of it is in our genes.

An umpire’s duties would be 90% easier if the participants cooperated. In golf, you have no need of umpires, referees, arbitrators, head linesmen, field judges. A golfer calls his own game. Safe or out, foul or fair ball, in-bounds or out, off-sides or on, is his decision. He is trusted to make it correctly. Even if no one else saw it, he’s expected to call an infraction if it occurs.

Baseball is barnacled with deceit. And fans revel in it. They chortle over the guy who illegally spits on the ball. Stealing is a source of pride in this game. And I don’t mean only bases. Stealing signals is a noble part of the grand old game.

So is corking bats. So is tilting foul lines to let bunts roll fair if you have a banjo-hitting team. So is watering down the infield if you have a sinker-ball pitching staff. So is watering down the basepaths if you face a base-stealing team. So is dumping sand on the water to create instant quicksand in the event the umpires make you fill in the water holes--as was done in Candlestick Park when Maury Wills was abroad on their baselines.

So is raising or lowering your pitchers’ mound depending on whether you have a long-armed, flame-throwing tall pitcher or a short, cute-pitching control artist. So is moving your outfield fences in when your homer potential is higher and out when the visiting club is the Yankees.

All these things have been done, and baseball chuckles. It’s considered a part of good old American gamesmanship to trap a ball and pretend you caught it.

You need six umpires to police a World Series ball game. You need seven officials (to watch over 22 players) in football. Tennis has them all over the place. The rule books read like War and Peace. There are more than 30 ways you can break the rules in football--and most of them are brought into play by the third quarter. In baseball, umpire lanes get so crowded they have been known to get in the way of the ball. In football, they have occasionally busted up a pass pattern.

I’m no fan of runaway morality but in golf the honor system seems to work. In baseball, cheating is as much a part of the game as a hit-and-run.

You need a third opinion for balls and strikes. It’s a pretty subjective issue. But, by and large, a baserunner knows whether he’s safe or out. An outfielder knows whether he caught the ball or not. A pitcher knows when he’s making an illegal pitch. If the game weren’t played by such a collection of scofflaws it would be easy to officiate. I’m not sure you’d have to turn it over to an army of tin men if players were to cooperate. Besides, what would the replay robot do if the manager kicked dirt on him? Poked him in the chest? Suppose the gamblers got to him? What baseball needs is not more surveillance but more honesty.