Umpin' Ain't Easy
You make the call.
Everybody hates the umpire.
They make a good call, but against your team, and the boos and the “are you blind?” exclamations come out.
They make a good call, but for your team, it’s the other side that gets upset.
They make a bad call, but for your team, you keep your trap shut even though the other side, screaming about it, is right.
They make a bad call, and it’s against your team, the yelling really starts, and the “umps lost us/nearly lost us the game” lines will inevitably be expressed.
A good ump is a shadow, invisible. A ninja. He or she makes the right calls, all the time. End of the story. Unfortunately, umpires are only human. They make mistakes. It’s part of the game. I can even get behind a consistent ump, especially if he or she calls a visible ball a strike every time. However, umpires who interject themselves into the sporting event are the worst because they get in the way of fans who came out to enjoy the game, not to watch the antics of the umpire.
Umpiring is a thankless job. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be an umpire or a referee, depending on the sport.
One of my biggest pet peeves is umpires and referees who make it about themselves.
I’m reminded of Ted Valentine, who for decades was one of the best college basketball referees in the business. Still, his antics on the court earned him the nickname, “TV Teddy.”
The Indiana-Illinois game in the late 90s, when Valentine issued a technical to Bobby Knight as he came out to check on his injured player, is one of his lowlights. I’m a huge Illinois fan and can’t stand Knight, but man, was he in the right, and TV Teddy was in the wrong.
You can see Valentine knew full well he’d made a massive mistake and wasn’t about to take it back and make Knight the higher authority. As the announcers explain, he could have quickly taken it back immediately and restored order once the other ref, Ed Hightower, explained it to him. He didn’t, and since he chose the path of boos and taunts, he had to stick to his guns and not admit he'd made a mistake. He inserted himself into the proceedings in a way that was quite dumb and should have been avoided.
But I get it.
In my high school days, one of the best ways to make a bit of money was to umpire in Little League. I spent a summer going to Khoury League games, putting on a blue shirt and calling balls and strikes for 10–12-year-olds. It was fun. Mostly.
As an umpire, I was pretty good at calling balls and strikes. As a Khoury League ump, the most important thing to do was to ignore the crowd as they yelled after every pitch and every call. I was mostly embarrassed for these parents as they lived vicariously through their children’s ability to play baseball.
One time, a foul tip went straight into my mask, knocking me back and stunning me for a bit. As my custom behind the plate, I didn’t yell out balls. If I didn’t say “Strike” and make a pointing motion, it was a ball. I hadn’t made a strike call on the foul tip, so the count on the scoreboard didn’t reflect a second strike. The next pitch, I called the batter out with a third strike, and nearly everyone in the stands rooting for the batter’s team went ape shit because they all thought it was strike two. It was not strike two. I hadn’t messed up the call; I just didn’t automatically indicate strike two because a Khoury ball had hit me in the face mask.
Parents screamed at me from behind the chain link fence. I was called all sorts of names. The batter called out didn’t complain. His coach didn’t complain. It was the parents. The fans.
Of course, the worst thing I did as an umpire was, to say the least, borderline inserting myself into a game over a controversial call.
I was umpiring in the field with a man on first. Since we only had two umps per game, I was standing behind second, ready to make a call on an attempted steal and prepared to run closer to first to make the call on a groundout or even a rare double play.
The batter hit a home run. He’s celebrating like a 12-year-old who hit a home run might, jumping around and throwing his fists in the air. He was basking in the glory. I’m standing practically on top of second base. He heads to second and doesn’t step on the bag on his home run trot. I have about 10 seconds to decide whether to call the kid out as soon as he steps on home for not stepping on second base. I weigh the odds. He steps on home plate, and I walk past the mound toward home and call the runner out.
The kid runs at me and stops short of tackling me. He yells. His coach comes out. He screams. The parents on that side of the fence are just short of storming the field. I continue walking toward the home plate umpire I was paired with that game, an older gentleman who had seen plenty and called many balls and strikes, and says quietly, “He didn’t step on the bag.” He just sighed.
I walked back to my perch behind first base and endured a constant barrage of nasty words from fans and parents along the first base line. It was constant. I ignored them.
I might have been in the right, but I was so very wrong.
It was the last time I umpired.
It’s good to be reminded that we all make mistakes. It’s also good to learn from the experience and not make the same mistake twice.
For me, I should keep my own Khoury ball umpiring experience at the forefront, especially when I want to yell at umpires and referees when calls don’t go my way while watching my favorite teams.
Be seeing you.
Tarps Off
On May 15, a group of Stephen F. Austin club baseball players showed up to Busch Stadium on a Friday night in May, found an empty section in right field, looked at each other, and decided they needed to take their shirts off.
Someone did. Then more did. Then hundreds did. They waved their shirts like rally towels, sang “Mr. Brightside,” and stayed loud through 11 innings until Ivan Herrera punched a walk-off three-run homer in the 10th to beat the Pirates, then ripped his own jersey off and twirled it in celebration.
Tarps Off was born.
Over the past three seasons, Cardinals attendance had been declining. This was supposed to be a rebuilding year. The club is surprisingly among the NL Central contenders, but nobody had a script for what was happening in right field. The Cardinals officially endorsed the movement, dedicating the upper right-field bleachers to Tarps Off fans and inviting any ticket holder willing to match the energy.
The Cardinals got lucky. It was a confluence of a younger roster playing with something to prove, a fanbase that was maybe a little bored and waiting for permission to be loud again, and a bunch of college kids who said screw it and took their shirts off. The Athletic put it well: “Tarps Off is what happens when a younger, louder roster and the newer, more appealing innovations in the game appeal to a demographic baseball has been desperate to woo. In St. Louis, every waved shirt feels like a victory.”
The sport has been chasing the young fan for a generation now. Pitch clocks, bigger bases, rule changes that actually work. Some of it has helped. None of it looked like this. It didn’t come from a focus group. It came from a Friday night when some college dudes decided to make some noise.
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
Ted Chiang is emphatic: LLMs are nowhere near conscious.
What would it take to convince me that a computer program is actually conscious and using language the way that people use language? Let me offer an analogy. If tomorrow someone showed me a video of an astronaut in a spaceship orbiting Alpha Centauri, a star that’s 4.3 light-years from Earth, what would I have to see in that video to convince me that it was real? My answer to that is, there is nothing in the video itself that would convince me. No matter how high the video resolution is or how realistic the scenery is, I would feel confident in saying that the video is fake. I won’t pay attention to any video of an astronaut orbiting Alpha Centauri unless I have previously seen good evidence that astronauts have landed on Mars, that astronauts have reached the moons of Jupiter, that astronauts have reached the moons of Saturn, and that astronauts have crossed the orbit of Pluto. Before anyone can credibly claim that they’ve solved an extraordinarily difficult engineering problem, I need to be confident that they have previously solved the many much simpler problems that precede the difficult problem.
To put it another way: An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential. If we’re trying to determine whether a computer program is conscious and using language the way a human does, we shouldn’t look only at the contents of any particular conversational exchange; we should be looking at how that conversation fits within the broader context of the development of artificial consciousness (which right now is entirely hypothetical). Any given observation can be easily manufactured; this doesn’t mean we need to give up on the idea of observation as a source of knowledge, but we need to rely on context to determine which observations deserve our trust.
Running in the Rain
I used to run cross-country in high school and college. I was mediocre at best, which still earned me the distinction of being the first four-year letter winner in cross-country at Illinois College and the team captain my senior year.
With my bad ankles and knees, my running days are over. Some people have dreams where they are flying. Not me. I have dreams where I’m running.
The absolute best was when a light rain would start. It would be in the dead heat of summer, and I’d be on one of my long runs to try and keep in shape before the season started. I’d be overheating, and that first drop would cool me down, then another, and another. Before long, I was feeling good. Sweat was rushing off of me in rivers of rain.
I loved running in the rain. I never felt uncomfortable unless I stopped. It was a partner in running longer, faster, and free. I’d run with the storm, not stop and look for a canopy to hide under.
Storms come in all shapes and sizes: A failed relationship, an unexpected bill, work piling up day after day.
How do you deal with the storms of life? Do you stop and take cover, waiting for it to let up, or do you run with it as an inevitable partner, splashing puddles all the way? I’ve always run with the storms. I try to make the best of the situation, learn from mistakes, and be better next time.
The only way to grow is to become a little bit more comfortable in areas where you are uncomfortable.
Something is Happening in Georgia
This is one of the best political speeches of my lifetime. It’s giving me the same vibes as Obama’s 2004 speech.
I might be going out on a limb here, but I think he might be running for President in a couple of years.
