U.S. Stealular

To: White Sox
From: MLB
Contents: One gift-wrapped three-game sweep

My dad frequently resorts to the old "it was fixed" angle whenever he's watching any game with shady officiating. My standard response in these situations is that the officiating was merely incompetent, and that no conspiracy is afoot. But you watch a series like the Cubs/White Sox series at US Cellular this weekend and it's really hard to come to a different conclusion. Incompetent officiating is nothing new, but it's rare to see officiating so blatantly one-sided. I watched most of the Saturday game and the first two innings of Sunday night's game, until the point where it was apparent the umpires had no intention of calling the game fairly. And while I obviously have my rooting interest, at no point did I feel like the Cubs were getting a fair shake.

If an umpire has a bad strike zone, that's one thing - if he enforces it the same way for everyone. That certainly didn't happen in Sunday night's game - Buehrle had to throw a pitch either above the shoulders or in the dirt for it to be a ball. Everything else was a strike. Pitches six inches outside and two inches below the knee were routinely strikes, as they had been the previous day for the White Sox relievers. How a team is expected to produce any offense when those kinds of pitches are strikes is beyond me. It wasn't a problem for the White Sox, of course, because the Cubs' strike zone was half the size. Marshall threw a curveball that should have struck Thome out; ESPN even showed the K-Zone replay showing that it was an obvious strike. It was called a ball; on the next pitch, Thome singled. On Saturday, the plate umpire was making his own judgment on check swings, something which is virtually never seen; most of the times he did it, a Cub was at the plate. On Sunday, Crede checked his swing well through the hitting zone; it was called no swing. When Piniella came out to argue, he was tossed by the plate umpire even as his back was turned to said umpire.

The crew was part minor league umpires, so maybe they were just staggeringly incompetent. But they really were just incredibly, bafflingly incompetent. And it's amazing to think that they could be so incompetent just against the Cubs. Maybe it was just home-field bias and not actually a sinister plot to have the White Sox win, but even if that's the case, it exposes a real problem in the way baseball is officiated. And it makes me laugh when I hear people talk about how horrible replay would be, because the "human element" needs to be preserved. You know what? When the "human element" is this fucking terrible, who needs it?