On the Replacements

Can we baseball fans stop for a minute and realize how lucky we are? In the midst of last year's NFL and NBA lockouts and the NHL lockout and NFL refs lockout of 2012, the biggest problem that baseball fans have until 2020 is in the details of compensating draft picks. 

The situation of the NFL referees hit a low point last night, with a horribly horrible call to end a nationally televised game that led to Pete Carroll's team beating Aaron Rodgers' team.* It has sunk to the point where players all over the league are so upset by the replacements that they no longer care about any semblance of discretion on social media. They're even offering solutions that the owners and commissioner Roger Goodell should take a look at (using fines from these outbursts to fund the referees demands). 

Again, put this in perspective. The list of gaffes by the replacement referees is growing by the week. Every game there's someone forgetting a hand signal, giving a player who doesn't exist a penalty, giving Jim Harbaugh an extra timeout because he looks angry all the time, or like we saw on Monday Night Football, blowing the game.

Us baseball fans see our share of #UmpShows, complaining about the strike zone or about a neighborhood call around second base, but can you imagine? Something like what happened with Jim Joyce and Armando Galarraga's non-perfect game happening EVERY DAY? Because that's where we are right now. This is happening every Sunday. And in football, you don't have 161 other days to recover. You have like...two. Maybe. If you're lucky. 

And that replacement referee who blew the Packers-Seahawks game is definitely NOT going to look like this next week.

So baseball fans: let's be happy. Playoffs are almost here. We know all the umpires names. And although we bag on them like crazy, at least we know they're the real deal.

*This is important because Pete Carroll is a terrible person.