I’m pretty sure they’re going to have to shuttle Phil Cuzzi in a bulletproof car from the airport to the Metrodome on Sunday.

ESPN glossed over it (and it’ll be forcefully forgotten within 20 minutes….ago).  They aired a clip of the lead umpire saying that the umpire will not be penalized because….(wait for it)....he feels bad. 

‘Course, it was done intentionally.  Saying that declaring that fair ball foul was an accident is as abjectly bogus as saying that this Shysterball post was typed as Craig accidentally fiddled with his keyboard.  Kinda like, ya know, putting three bullets in Pat Tillman’s forehead from 30 yards away.  “It was an accident!!!”

There is such a thing as the work of an intelligent agent, and then there are the works of randomness (such as an accident).  Being able to distinguish between them is not just the work of police detectives, insurance fraud investigators, and archaeologists….it’s a part of basic everyday human reasoning.

Alas, this is America.  In modern day America, servility before authority trumps human honesty.

——-

On another note….A-Roid is a fraud and was only good because of steroids and must be banned from baseball!!! A-Rod is a clutch hero!!!

Instead of beers, Cuzzi wants to know if he can just lay low in Bucknor’s basement for a few months.

“Damn.  I feel bad for the guy still, though.  We’ve all made countless mistakes at our jobs (some worse than this), I’m sure.  Fortunately, none of my mistakes have been on national broadcasts.”

I know!  Like, take poor Tim Donaghy.  Here’s a guy who was making all these mistakes and, just ‘cause he was in a position with high visibility, everybody was pouncing all over him for the mistakes.  He’s the victim, not the people on the blunt end of those “mistakes”! 

In all seriousness, I guess that there’s some basic psychological explanation that people always respond like this, by making the perpetrator into the victim.  I think it’s just a lot easier than it is to acknowledge the powerlessness we all have over the corruption.  (I noticed that ESPN.com and their televised coverage both advocated the same idea: it was an “accident” and we should feel sorry for him.  Then, they compound the idiocy by saying that it was actually the Twins’ fault because, even though the umpire indisputably cost them a run, they “failed to capitalize on lots of opportunities!”  Well, no, they actually succeeded at taking an 11th-inning lead.  MLB stole it from ‘em.)

Holy crap.  I mean, it was a bad call, and I wish it had been made correctly, but you’re seriously asserting that they’ve fixed the games?  Come on.

The burden of proof is on the person MAKING the outrageous claim, not the person wondering why the outrageous claim should be taken seriously.

Your evidence is: it was an easy call to make and he didn’t make it.

That would be compelling evidence if people never erred on easy calls (or easy fastballs, or easy outs, or easy fly balls…Matt Holliday). But as it is, it seems as if Occam’s Razor neatly covers this as: “MLB coddles their umps and we have mediocre umpires at the MLB level who aren’t held accountable for their mistakes.”

Pretty straightforward stuff. Phil Cuzzi’s always been a pretty #### umpire. But then again, lots of umpires have been shitty. It seems the rational mind would say “MLB has its share of lousy umps” but who knows. I guess anything’s possible.

All—Craig has been beating this drum all year. He thinks umps are sacred, he believes MLB is incorruptible, and he is adamant that people prove that otherwise rather than he provide any evidence for his claims.  You try to convince him how ridiculous it is, but he is utterly immune to reason on this point.

——-

Alright, enough screwing around.  Wouldn’t the fact that I’ve been “beating this drum all year”, like, support the thesis?  This means that I provided incident after incident after incident after incident (which I did)....and yet people still refused to consider the potential. 

The very fact that people refuse to consider it is proof that MLB knows they can get away with it.  “Our sheep customers have invested so much idolatry into the myth of our incorruptibility that we can do anything we want.” 

Like I wrote before, you see the same thing in government, where we now routinely have banana republic-style assassinations (I could literally list a dozen since 2003)....where private investigators are hired to investigate the murders and then soon run screaming from their own investigations yelling, “Look, I can’t finish this job - here, take your money back!!!”....

....The murderers know they’re inoculated from even being investigated, let alone prosecuted, because of this same reason: the myth of the Incorruptibility of the Powerful.  (Actually, I think it’s people pretending that the powerful are incorruptible, but they all know it’s bulls—-.)

(Incidentally, the late, great Michael Crichton was going to right a book about people’s “secret, private wish to live in a totalitarian state”.  Unfortunately, cancer took him, but the idea still stands.) 

Let me ask you this: where were all the ESPN and Sports Illustrated and Fox Sports reporters in the late-90’s and early-00’s when NBA game-fixing was rampant and completely obvious?  Answer: they were right where THT and all of you guys are right now: participating in the corruption by pretending it didn’t exist.

It’s cool.  MLB=WWE=THT’s Happiness.

Did someone lose their hat last night?

David- I wasn’t the one making unsupported claims. That means I don’t have to offer proof.

I don’t know for sure if the fix is in or not. I do, however, know that you don’t know either. That’s all my comment was saying.

Alex,

That makes sense.  But, like I said, this was so facially bogus that I think that the obvious, default explanation is corruption, not stupidity.

If you were wearing a red shirt and I said “You’re wearing a blue shirt”, you wouldn’t immediately assume it was a mistake, you’d assume that such a total mistake was done intentionally.  Same idea here.

Like I wrote earlier, detecting intelligence vs. randomness is a fundamental thought activity we all do all the time.  I guess modern Americans just bypass it when they’re facing powerful entities.