Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Everybody Made Nice

After some dramatics between the umpires and MLB, there is now an agreement between the two for instant replay:

The deal was signed by lawyers for the commissioner's office and the World Umpires Association one day after a WUA spokesman went public with complaints over negotiations.

After haggling over final details, the sides exchanged proposals Tuesday night.

"We reached an agreement. Final decision with respect to moving ahead has not been made yet, but we have an agreement with the umpires," said Rob Manfred, baseball's executive vice president of labor relations.

Hooray for negotiations. Amazing how things seemed so far apart during Mike and Mike this morning but are all nicey-nice now. Maybe Selig told the umpires that if they didn't agree, Mongo would travel from city to city, drink beer, and incoherently call out the umps repeatedly.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why do the umpires care about instant replays? How does it affect them in any way?

Christopher D. Heer said...

Historically umpires have made a big deal about being "shown up" on the field. If a player (or manager) does anything to show an umpire up, that player (or manager) gets tossed. Umpires have argued that this is the only way they can keep control of mercurial athletes.

Instant replay also will be an official way to show umpire mistakes. Umpires have strongly resisted anything that even smacks of checking their work; the QuesTec system of checking balls and strikes nearly caused a riot with them (figuratively speaking). Unlike, say, NFL referees, umpires are not publicly graded on their performance.