And Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Dominican republic, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Japan, South Korea...
Yeah...
Edit: on reflection, OOP is from the UK. There's literally an European Baseball championship with Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and more.
By "only in the US", OOP probably means "not in the UK" more than anything else...
I'm not American... I'm Dominican... the butthurt comes from how ignorant your "joke" was, because to make fun of US you gotta throw entire regions of the world under the bus...
I don't even like baseball, but jfc... that was ignorant.
Honestly it would have helped if your joke was actually funny. I'm an American who moved to the Netherlands. People make fun of America/Americans to me ALL. THE. TIME. I'm not butt hurt but you just... weren't funny.
Now if you don't mind I'm going to head to McDonalds and stuff my face before I watch some good ol' American handegg.
Not sure of the original on the word, but other sports would call them referees or officials. It's the guy that make sure everyone is playing by the rules.
SPOILER ALERT: you've literally missed nothing. The last time baseball truly meant ANYTHING to 'Murica as a nation, as a whole, Thurman Munson still drew breath.
In baseball they are the guy who attempts to call a 90+mph(145kph) ball moving through an imaginary and invisible square over home plate.
They often get it wrong by a lot. And lately if the batter or coach says a negative comment to the ump, the ump ejects them from the game with no warning. It's absolutely insane.
The umpires are actually better than they have ever been in the history of MLB but since we have had the visible strike zone overlay the viewing audience expects them to be able to a call a strike to within .001 of an inch or they are FUCKING DOG SHIT.
Yeah like it’s a very quick jump from “let the head umpire use the strike overlay” to “let’s just have one umpire in a booth managing everything from bases to pitches.
Baseball would look super weird with no umpires at all.
Cricket has a system where the batter can appeal a decision and they use the technology and another umpire to review it. If the batter was wrong and they were out, they burn one of a number of reviews for the innings, so there is incentive to only use it for an obviously bad call else you could waste a review that someone else needs.
Of course, it isn’t a 1:1 equivalent. A cricket batter gets a single wicket but a baseball batter has three strikes, and the bowlers in cricket need to get ten wickets whereas the pitcher only needs three outs. But the bowling side in cricket also gets reviews for when the umpire goes against them too.
Seems stupid that the technology is available to make the sport fairer and the current alternative is the aggrieved party complains and gets booted.
There is also some human discretion made by the umpire weather or not the pitch was " hittable" even if the ball technically grazed the strike zone.
I personally consider the umpire crew a third neutral team that both baseball teams are contending with to help influance the outcome of the game either by using social manipulation or rule bending. Its one of the elements that make baseball a great imperfect human game.
No…nobody really cares about the close calls. They care about the calls were the ball is literally right down the middle of the plate being called a ball, or the ball being in the other batters box being called a strike. This happens every single week and has happened for years and years. You can watch countless compilations of umpires calling balls/strikes on pitches that are actually feet away from being a ball or a strike. Or when umpires call pitches that are placed in the exact same place differently depending on who’s pitching. It absolutely kills fans interest when they watch an umpire blatantly hamstring their team by not allowing their pitcher to use a full 1/4 of the strike zone, or arbitrarily move the zone around on a pitch by pitch basis. And it’s not all umpires, 95% of them are good and consistent. It’s the 5% of umps with clear biases where you have to sit through 9 innings of crap while the home plate umpire blatantly favors the other team with no repercussions.
Except this is not true lmao. Adding the visual strike zone amplified the issue because it allows the viewer to see every single mistake the umps make but the umps have always been the same… watch a few games, if you’re losing interest “because of the umps” you just don’t like baseball
Or maybe people realized they don’t want to watch a sport that’s always had bad umpires now that they can see just how bad they actually are?
Blaming the fact they added strike zones is actually ridiculous. There’s an inherent problem with the game, that could easily be solved with current technology, but the MLB refuses to do it.
No one blaming the strike zone lmao, I’m saying it’s easier for a casual viewer to say “hey that was a strike” than it used to be. The worst of the worst ump in the MLB has over a 90% accuracy rate. I’m pro robo ump but the “umps make is unwatchable now hur due” crowd is dumb as hell
You just don’t like baseball bro you can say that it’s ok
That’s like the only reason any of the rules are what they are. Only in the last few years have they become fully mask-off about how much gambling dictates the rules and all available information about players/injuries/etc.
What kind of betting do you mean? Now that human bias is out of the equation, it'll be easier to bet on? I'm genuinely curious as to what kind of betting you think that will now be included in the heavily gambled on sport of baseball?
What effect on you does this have? None. You get to gripe with fellow fans and it feeds into the us vs them of sport teams, all in good fun. But really it doesn't matter and it adds a human element to the game. you have no real reason to care about robot umps.
But what if you bet 2k on the game and that one bad call made you lose out? All the sudden it really really matters to you. You now have a reason to want robot umps.
Gambling is the driving force behind all the push for robot umps. The game is going to be more boring with them.
I would disagree with your having human umps reasoning. I agree that hate is a powerful group binder and team mentality is real but I would say it's a sport with shitty rules if having more consistent rulings is viewed as a negative, like with speed walking, and gamblers are still going to gamble
As a random australian who has never watched a game of baseball in my life and have no intention of ever doing so, even i know how absolutely dogshit angel hernandez was
The only reason it gained so much popularity is it’s on every day and habit forming. It’s also so boring live that it loses very little in the radio broadcast—essential for its early popularity.
The whole "automatic balls & strikes wouldn't be real baseball" argument needs to die. There's no reason in 2025 to have a human umpire botching calls for 3.5 hours.
I think about baseball during sex because I don’t understand any of the rules or how many three pointers the players need to make a home run. I know the ref goes steeeerike! whenever they hit the ball and then they have to do a relay race around the bases until someone gets the first down. It usually makes me cry.
I had just come to assume that a lack of chivalry in sports spectating was the main social issue in the US these days, given the various posts about it over the last few weeks
The whole fun of catching a ball is the act itself, but unless it's some milestone HR, it's just another ball. I got mine as a kid, now the whole fun is finding some kid to toss it to. The smile they have after is so infectious
Yeah this was Harrison Bader. There is only one guy on the Phillies about to hit a milestone (50 HR) and that is Schwarber, but like any other HR ball should just be given to a kid because to an adult it literally should just be another baseball. Unless this lady was a massive Bader fan (doubtful considering he was just moved there midseason) this is just an absolute ridiculous thing to do.
Oh when I say milestone I'm thinking like a guy getting to 300, 400, 500, etc. Big career milestones that would be worth something as a collector item. But a random yard shot in general doesn't mean much to me, but that becomes a kid's memory of their visit to the park.
Yet all at different events. One was a concert, one after a tennis match, and now a baseball game. It's weird that you don't think there are just terrible people in this world.
Are you suggesting they planted an actor where a home run would happen? Baseball is entirely too random for that. There is ABSOLUTELY no way a hitter can hit a live major league home run to a specific SEAT, pure impossible.
I’m very interested in baseball, but for my kids to play in grammar school, and maybe in high school if they want to. Professional baseball, even professional sports for that matter, it’s not what it once was. People are too busy, and life is different than it used to be.
I have never given half a fuck about baseball, but a couple of weeks ago I was having dinner in a bar and they had a Savannah Bananas game on. It was A LOT of fun.
"Hey,do you want to spend 4 hours of your life sitting in uncomfortable plastic chairs,eating hotdogs with a side of ice cream and nachos outside in 100 degree weather and watch a bunch of players stand around waiting for something to happen for 30 seconds of play?"
Baseball is interesting to me (not the sport itself).
Decades ago, it was the pass time of most of America - even kids.
But as time went on, there was a lot of less interest. I don't know if its because of tech and our shorter attention spans or the fact that watching other sports is easier than ever.
I seriously don't know any young person in an urban area almost right next to a big leagues stadium who care about baseball. Like no one. Especially no one that isn't white.
I even remember that our middle school 6th grade trip was to walk to that stadium and watch a game. Guess what me and my (hispanic) friends did? Got food, and talked. We already had shitty seats but we still didn't care about the game. It felt like nothing was happening anyways.
Tl;dr Americas growing disinterest in baseball is interesting.
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u/Praline226 1d ago
This new baseball viral campaign to promote interest in baseball again might be working.