LISTEN TO ME BECAUSE I AM SWEATING THROUGH MY STRIPES ONCE AGAIN AND THIS IS NOT A DRILL! You are tuning into the voice of reason in a world gone mad and that is me standing on top of the table because gravity cannot hold me down when logic enters this building. My name is Ry-Guy and I am twenty years deep in the officiating trenches from Mukwonago where we know what sweat means before it even touches your skin! It drips off my nose right now onto the keyboard tray like a broken faucet that no plumber ever called back to fix because nobody wants to pay for water usage when there is free rain outside! I remember twenty-four hundred and four in Kenosha on that humid afternoon where I whistled a foul ball out of bounds during a high school game! It was hot then just like it is now but the sweat felt different back then because we had not invented robots yet to judge our existence with cold metal eyes staring down at us through cameras mounted on poles taller than any tree in the county forest preserve.
Now Major League Baseball wants me to trust a machine that does not know what heat feels like! They say players can challenge ball and strike calls now by tapping their helmet or hat as if they are summoning an invisible spirit guide from above! The Yankees versus Giants opener starts this Wednesday night according to the newsprint in my pocket which is soaked through with liquid despair because I have been standing here too long under a light that does not cool down when you ask it nicely. You need two challenges per game at best and if you lose both then your right to question reality vanishes like smoke on a hot day! This sounds simple enough but try explaining the difference between an inch of latitude on a pitch versus thirty inches of human error in real time while wearing sunglasses that reflect too much light onto the screen.
FOR THE LOVE OF SPOTTED COW! What kind of logic dictates that you must tap your helmet like it is a prayer wheel to get an answer from a computer? The Farley inside me wants to scream because this feels ridiculous and I know why because I have been watching these humans try to figure out the strike zone for twenty years without any help other than a whistle! You think tapping plastic makes sense when you are standing at home plate feeling like a target in a shooting gallery with no cover? It is not just about hitting it hard anymore. The data shows that fifty-three percent of challenges were successful during spring training and this means almost half the time they press the button nothing changes on the board! That is worse than trying to win an argument at Kwik Trip when you know you paid too much for gas but nobody listens to your complaint because the pump is a machine with no ears.
I remember back in two thousand nine that I had to officiate a game where Blake showed up and tried to explain offside rules using hand signals! He was trying to make it look like we were playing soccer on ice while everyone else just wanted to see who could slide into home base without breaking their collarbone first. The umpires did not care about the signal system because they only cared if you paid for your beer at half time or bought a pretzel at Culver’s instead of doing laundry that night! Blake is always telling me that modern technology solves problems we create ourselves but I tell him it creates new ones like checking heights in the morning before people shrink during the day. The league measured everyone every single morning because they know height loss happens and you cannot call a pitch high if your own ruler changed length overnight!
This makes my head hurt so badly that I have to stand up now just to feel vertical again while the air conditioning at this viewing spot is broken like it was during those Brewers playoff games in twenty seventeen when we forgot how windows work. We are talking about pitchers throwing harder and violent follow-throughs where their heads go with them after they let loose a ninety-five mile per hour fastball! They cannot see what happened to the ball because physics says their body goes one way while reality happens another somewhere near the plate. The modern pitcher is less equipped than his counterpart from past eras according to executives who have never held a strike signal for longer than ten seconds in their life without complaining about shin guards or bad knees! I tell you this as someone whose shins look like map topography of mountain ranges but do not complain because the game requires sacrifice and pain is just part of the uniform design.
The data from spring training tells us that Kansas City Royals hitters were right only thirty-one percent of the time when they challenged calls which means three out of ten times they are tapping their helmet correctly! That is worse than a blind man trying to find his way through a dark parking lot with no flashlight and nobody calling for help because everyone else has already locked doors. Meanwhile Chicago Cubs hitters had best overturn rate at sixty-five percent which suggests some teams know what buttons matter while others just want to waste time tapping helmets like they are knocking on wood to stop the rain from falling during practice drills! You cannot tell me that every single team does not have strategy discussions happening in dark rooms where managers whisper about whether pitchers should challenge or catchers should do it because emotional investment gets too high when you throw a pitch.
Michael-Vincent told me last week that he would never let his pitcher tap the helmet during spring training but now he is changing his mind every hour like we are flipping switches on an old light panel in my grandfather’s house! He says pitchers have limited ability to identify where the ball actually was after they throw it because their follow through takes them off balance and away from reality. I tell Michael-Vincent that this sounds exactly like when you try to catch a flyball with no shoes on but nobody cares about your feet anymore in professional sports unless you are wearing cleats made of carbon fiber or something fancy. He is right though! Pitchers cannot see where the ball went because their head follows their arm and they fall off to one side while standing on dirt that has turned into mud during warmups from rain last night.
The league wants us to trust a system where every team gets two challenges unless you keep winning them which means if your challenge works then you get another one! This creates a situation in the eighth or ninth innings where teams are out of chances and important pitches still go missed because the clock has run out on human oversight for this specific game state. It feels like it is going to be frequent occurrence that a team runs out of challenges when they need them most according to executives who have never played baseball at all levels from Little League up through Triple A without feeling sweat pooling in their socks during long games in July heat. They are afraid you will lose ability to challenge pitches for rest of game and this makes managers nervous about giving permission early on!
ONE EXECUTIVE SAID TO TRUST INSTINCTS OF PLAYERS BUT WILL THAT LAST WHEN THEY ARE TIRED? The strategy discussions generated most conversation within camps as personnel gave general guidelines for regular season based on data they collected from spring training games. A Day One strategy might be different by Day Thirty because you learn something new every week when the ball hits the mitt hard and bounces away faster than you can blink! High leverage situations is popular term in camps though every player definition of that could mean something else entirely depending on how many fans are screaming outside the stadium gates. We tell players to hold challenges until later games more for just leverage strategy with only having two chances total available per game according to one exec who has not slept since February!
They try telling them make sure use it when leverage is high like full counts close games and late innings in summer heat where sweat makes your eyes water so bad you cannot see the strike zone anymore. Early in games teams mostly want egregious calls that everyone knows you can see on replay without needing a magnifying glass to read what actually happened during pitch flight path! Take emotion of close call out of decision only challenge when one hundred percent sure but it is easier said than done for humans who get excited and shout like crazy people at referees. Several teams will allow more freedom if team has two challenges as opposed to being down just one because running out with high leverage moments potentially remaining is a fear among all franchises no matter what city they represent on jerseys!
We are telling them to be much more selective when only have single challenge left and it must happen late in
One-Ry Out.