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Abstract
Mistaken judgments of fact by sporting officials – blown calls – are ubiquitous in sport and have altered the outcomes of games, championships, and even the record books. I argue that the effect these blown calls have on sports is deplorable, even unjust, and that given both the nature of sport in general and the social and economic importance of sports as they are played today, we ought to use technology to aid officials in making their judgments whenever doing so would prove more effective than relying on unaided human perception. I then briefly address a number of objections to the increased use of technology in officiating.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to all who have helped in improving this paper, in particular Dick Brook, D. Kenneth Brown, Jeffrey Fry, A.J. Kreider, Mark Phelan, Kurt Smith, and especially, Jan Boxill, Alan Nelson, Stuart Rachels, and Chase Wrenn.
Notes
1. Collins (Citation2010) argues that while there is widespread belief that technology is better at helping to determine sporting facts, this is only because people are largely ignorant of the degree to which such technologies are also subject to error. It is a mistake, Collins thinks, to be so confident that determinations made with technological aids are more accurate than those of human judges, especially in very close calls. True, many people are ignorant of the margins for error with advanced technology. Still, this seems to me no reason for resisting the use of technology. Hawk-eye, for example, is still better at tracking shots than the naked eye, even if it is not as good as most people might think it is.
2. Reitsma and Bassham (Citation2008) (following Flint (Citation2007)) call this the Refs View. I borrow the positivist label from Russell (Citation1997).
3. See Russell (Citation1997) for a critique of the positivist view and an alternative account. But, see also Mumford (Citation2006) for an account that does toe fairly close to the positivist line.
4. An additional absurdity of the positivist view, pointed out by Russell (Citation1997, 23), is that it entails that the players play no essential role in scoring runs, making outs, or winning games.
5. See Russell (Citation1997) for a fair sampling of some of the more outlandish endorsements of the positivist view by umpires.
6. Arguably, not all sports are games, but most are. I am mostly concerned with sports that are games, however, so any adequate theory of games will be adequate to these sports as well. Schneider (Citation2001) provides an overview of the relevant literature on this issue.
7. It is important to distinguish the constitutive rules of chess – the rules that make it the particular sort of game that it is – from other ‘rules’ of chess (what Suits calls rules of skill or strategy) such as ‘never leave one’s knight on the side of the board’ or what might be called regulative rules (rules governing, say, the interaction of the participants before, during, and after the competition).
8. See, for example, Official Baseball Rules, rule 1.03: ‘The winner of the game shall be that team which shall have scored, in accordance with these rules, the greater number of runs at the conclusion of a regulation game’.
9. Official Baseball Rules, rule 2.00.
10. Strangely, an undercalled pitch is neither a ball nor a strike according to the rules. It is not a ball since it either passed through the strike zone or was struck at by the batter. And it is not a strike since it was not ‘so called’ by the umpire.
11. I thank an anonymous referee for the Journal for raising this point.
12. More formally, FIDE Handbook rule 4.7 states: ‘A player forfeits his right to a claim against his opponent’s violation of Article 4 once he deliberately touches a piece’.
13. Those concerned with sportsmanship have extra reasons to care about the unfairness of blown calls. Each of the three major conceptions of sportsmanship essentially includes fairness. See Arnold (Citation2001). Whether the goal is mutual enjoyment of the activity, demonstrating athletic superiority, or some other end, fairness is essential to that end. Anyone concerned with sportsmanship, by all accounts, must inter alia be concerned with fairness. So, anything that affects the fairness of a contest is prima facie unsporting in addition to being just plain unfair. A committed sportsman ought to be committed to eliminating or rectifying unfairness in a contest, which should include being committed to eliminating or rectifying blown calls.
14. Reported in multiple sources.
15. The case of disgraced NBA referee Tim Donaghy is an all-too-real example of this. The FBI alleges that Donaghy took measures to fix games, usually by calling a higher-than-usual number of fouls. As a result, during the two seasons during which the FBI claims Donaghy was fixing games, the average point total in games he officiated was 10–13 points higher than the average over/under betting odds for NBA games (Drehs Citation2007a and Citation2007b).
16. This is unlike the comparison between a corrupt player who intentionally loses a game and a player who simply loses on their own merit. The player who loses honestly has played with integrity, and the outcome of the contest is thereby legitimate and, so to speak, well-earned. The corrupt player, however, has not earned her loss and her opponent has not earned the victory.
17. There may, of course, be additional features in the case of corruption that may engender stronger negative feelings than in the case of simple mistakes or incompetence; i.e., ill will, disrespect for the game, its traditions and players, etc. These additional features, however, only serve to heighten the sense that corruption is wrong. They do not by themselves, to my mind at least, constitute the wrongness of corruption. There is room for disagreement on this point. All I am claiming here is that the effects of honest officiating mistakes on the game are just as bad as the effects of corruption, and so if the problem with corruption is the effect it has on the outcomes of games, then we have as much reason to eliminate the former as the latter.
18. Russell offers a similar argument that mistakes by officials are unjust. See (Russell Citation2013). Russell puts the matter in terms of the fair distribution of necessarily scarce resources rather than Berman’s notion of desert. As far as I can see, the two renderings are perfectly compatible. A fair distribution of the scarce resources of competition is one that distributes them according to deserts.
19. A further argument is that blown calls are bad for the same reason that the influence luck is undesirable in sport: because it undermines the efforts of the players to determine the outcome of the game by their own skills. This is expressed in Simon’s Skill Thesis: competitive sports contests are tests of the competitors’ skills designed to determine which opponent is more skillful in the sport being played (Citation2007, 13). Mistaken calls by officials are additional lucky factors that can and do influence the outcomes of sporting contests in ways that may undermine claims that the athlete who wins is the more skillful. As such, they should be prevented, corrected, or have their effects otherwise mitigated. Of course, the issue of luck in sport is a difficult one by itself. Simon (Citation2007) gives good reasons for thinking that the influence of luck is not as dangerous to claims of athletic desert as we might initially think. I am more concerned by the undue influence of luck (and blown calls) on claims of athletic desert than Simon is, but I cannot deal with the issue more fully here due to space constraints.
20. Of the authors who have discussed the wrongness of blown calls and who have suggested remedies, only Berman (Citation2011) has held as I do that all mistakes by officials are problematic, but he does not address the question of whether and how technological aids ought to be used beyond arguing for de novo review for instant replay in the NFL. Russell comes next closest in arguing for a modest revision of the culture of baseball to ‘open up judgment calls to review, on occasion at least’ to remedy an otherwise ‘avoidable tragedy’ (Russell Citation1997, 32 and 29 respectively). Yet Russell maintains that ‘calls on balls and strikes, for example should only rarely, if ever, be subject to review’ (Citation1997, fn. 20). But I see no good argument for limiting the review of judgment calls only to those of larger apparent moment. Certainly, a homerun incorrectly called a foul ball takes away a run that otherwise would have been scored, and so Russell seems to accept that review is permissible, maybe even obligatory. But an undercalled pitch earlier in the at-bat may have unjustly given the batter the chance to hit the homerun-cum-foul in the first place. There is no way to tell which of the two missed calls had the larger impact on the outcome of the contest. Any attempt to draw a distinction between ‘significant’ and ‘insignificant’ blown calls is doomed to be ad hoc and arbitrary. There is no case to be made that one should be reviewed or be subject to advanced real-time monitoring and the other not.
21. See, for example, the inch-level GPS technology being developed by Priya Narasimhan (Carnegie Mellon University), capable of being embedded into a football and giving real-time location of the ball to an accuracy of less than an inch. Featured on The Science Channel’s ‘The Future Of …’ series in October, 2009. Available online at: http://science.discovery.com/videos/popscis-future-of-smart-football.html
22. Official Rules, ‘General Instructions to Umpires’ (subsequent to rule 9.05), p. 84.
23. Difficult questions loom here. Even at the professional level, the decision to introduce advanced technology can be a prohibitively costly one. Many leagues, especially women’s leagues, are strapped for cash. What should such a league do when faced with the decision, say, to either implement officiating technology or to keep ticket prices low to help subsidize its small-market teams? (I thank an anonymous referee for the Journal for suggesting this scenario.) The arguments I have given here obviously count as reasons to implement the officiating technology, but they are not necessarily decisive. Professional sports leagues are also businesses selling a product – a product that happens to be a sport. Opting for the officiating technology, I would say, is in the best interest of the sport, though perhaps not in the immediate best interest of the business. But it is probably also true that investing in improving one’s product is generally a wise longer-term business decision.
24. See (Davison Citation2007, 91), (Reitsma and Bassham Citation2008, 84), (Russell Citation1997, 36–37, n. 20), and MLB Commissioner Bud Selig’s comments in (Keri Citation2009) for starters.
25. This was a common response to the bad call by Jim Joyce that ruined Armando Gallaraga’s perfect game. Certainly, Joyce and Gallaraga both showed admirable restraint and humility in the aftermath. They should be lauded for doing so, but they shouldn’t have had to!
26. At least in baseball, the game originally had no umpires at all. See (Keri Citation2009).
27. See also Berman’s response to this objection (Citation2011, 1707), which is consonant with my own.
28. (Collins Citation2010, 137) and (Russell Citation1997, 29), respectively.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
S. Seth Bordner
Philosophy, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA.