The Cop Complex
What's behind poor refereeing?
Dear Readers,
Before we begin, we’d like to virtually pour one out for fans of the Oakland Athletics. It was announced this week, after years of finagling with the city of Oakland in an attempt to rob taxpayers of their money, that the team would be moving to Las Vegas. The A’s have one of the worst owners in the league, they stink this year and probably will for the foreseeable future, and now they’re out of Oakland. As Brad Pitt as Billy Beane once put it, “There are rich teams, and there are poor teams. Then there’s fifty feet of crap, and then there’s us.” However much we enjoy Moneyball, we’d be remiss if we didn’t say — this is the ultimate problem with rooting for teams to “overcome the odds [terrible tight-pocketed ownership].” Eventually, it leads to your team moving to Vegas. At least A’s fans can finally be released from the horror.
On a vaguely lighter note, the NBA Playoffs are in full swing, which means that we get to hear about a lot of great basketball — and a lot of strange refereeing. More on that below, hope you enjoy.
-Ian and Calder
The Phoenix Suns’ veteran point guard Chris Paul has been in a lot of playoff games, and despite never winning an NBA title, he’s won more than half of them — at the time of writing, he’s gone 72-70. But late Tuesday night, the basketball world was largely shocked that he had prevailed in the second game of a first-round series.
That is because that game was officiated by the NBA’s Scott Foster, and Paul’s teams had lost 13 consecutive playoff games when he suited up in the pinstripes. It’s a record that, when compared with Paul’s overall playoff record, is simply too long standing to be a coincidence. And there are reported comments from Foster that back this up.
According to ESPN, while Paul was in the NBA bubble in 2020 preparing for a decisive Game 7 against the Houston Rockets that was going to be reffed by Foster, the referee took some time before the game to speak to the point guard. As Paul tells it, Foster reminded him that 12 years earlier, he had refereed another Game 7 loss for Paul against the San Antonio Spurs.
The comments, Paul believed, were designed to get in his head. And no matter whether you’re a fan of Chris Paul or not, you can admit that one NBA referee — who is consistently put in positions to impact the outcome of playoff games — holds a grudge against one of the league’s marquee players.
This is patently insane. Why the league hasn’t done anything about this is beyond understanding. But it also speaks to the broader way that many referees approach their jobs: they make the games about them. Among sports fans, there are even sayings that go around whenever a ref makes an egregious call or gets overly aggressive with a player: “welcome to the ref show” (or in baseball, where they’re called umpires, “welcome to the ump show”). Fans on Twitter have taken to negatively comparing them to cops.
The comparison has some legitimate merit. We’re not going full ACAB, just like we’re not going full anti-ref (there are a few good ones mixed in there), but think about the sort of person the job of “referee” attracts. It’s rule followers. People who delight in telling others when they’re right and when they’re wrong. Even more than many cops, who often take the gig because it’s a solid paying job that doesn’t require any sort of advanced degree, referees have to train for years at this specific skill — telling people when they’ve broken the rules — before they reach the big leagues.
Once they’re there, some of their behavior becomes positively authoritarian. Take MLB umpire Dan Bellino, who ejected star Diamondbacks pitcher Madison Bumgarner last year after staring him down, for no clear reason, during a routine “substance check” (something MLB has implemented in recent years in order to cut down on pitchers using illegal substances to control the ball).
Or Phil Cuzzi, who since the substance checks began, has been the only umpire in the major leagues to eject a player for reportedly having a foreign substance on their hands — he’s done it three times, most recently also this week, ejecting the Mets’ Max Scherzer from a game.
The Scherzer case illustrates the point. Scherzer insists (in fact, swore on his children’s lives, he said), that he only uses league-provided rosin on his hands. He was one of the pitchers who was most publicly against “spider tack,” the substance that other pitchers were using to control their pitches, and said he’s never used it in his life. Of course, his public comments don’t prove anything. But the events during the game give us some clues.
In the third inning, Cuzzi made Scherzer change his glove, believing that there was something wrong with it. He got a new glove, showed it to Cuzzi, Cuzzi inspected it and then aggressively shoved it back into his chest. Scherzer pitched another inning, went back into the dugout, and then when he came out for the fourth, Cuzzi pulled him aside, felt his hands again, and ejected him from the game (an ejection that comes with an automatic 10-day suspension).
As Scherzer said after the game, an MLB official watched him wash his hands of any rosin that was already on them. And he also noted correctly that he would “have to be an idiot” to try to cheat the very inning after Cuzzi pulled him aside.
After the game, umpires didn’t speak to the press, but did release quotes through one pool reporter who had access. And — what do you know — Bellino was one of the other umpires on the crew with Cuzzi. Bellino said after the game that “[Scherzer’s hand] was so sticky that when we touched his hand, our fingers were sticking to his hand. And whatever was on there remained on our fingers afterwards for a couple innings.”
Sorry, but bullshit. You can watch the inspection on television, there’s zero indication that their “fingers were sticking to his hand.” And even if there was, Scherzer’s comments — that he washed his hands in front of an MLB official and that he’d be an idiot to cheat — ring true. If umpires are like cops, we should treat their public statements like police reports; namely, that after misconduct they’re made with the express purpose of damage control.
Scherzer was a lead player representative during MLB’s labor strife, and he has few friends in the league office after reportedly (righteously!) yelling at them during talks. There’s little chance he avoids his 10 game suspension.
But hopefully, his and Paul’s plight makes league offices wake up to the fact that no one is paying any money to watch referees have a temper tantrum that they are not being Sufficiently Respected. We’re not holding our breath.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about…
… more information about the A’s sale? “The Las Vegas A's? The latest on potential move from Oakland” by Jeff Passan in ESPN.
… players suspended for gambling in the NFL? “N.F.L. Walks a Fine Line on Players’ Betting” by Jenny Vrentas in The New York Times.
… Shohei Ohtani and his closest comparison Bo Jackson? “What’s It Like to Be Shohei Ohtani? Only Bo Would Know.” by Tyler Kepner in The New York Times.