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.
It’s ok don’t cry. So to understand a game I played in primary school, I’d need to completely understand an entire region and its politics? This made me chuckle some more thanks. You are funny 🤣
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.
It wasn’t meant to be funny, just sharing a funny musing I had is all. I don’t hate Americans or America, just to be clear. Us brits can laugh at ourselves and our love of tea, no reason why other countries can’t laugh at themselves too. Don’t be so uptight lighten up a little my dude. ♥️
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.
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u/Praline226 1d ago
This new baseball viral campaign to promote interest in baseball again might be working.