Making It Perfectly Clear

By Tom Callahan

Baseball was always better suited for radio, where the ballplayers could only be imagined spitting invectives at the umpires, and the umps' own lips could not be read so distinctly. But since technology is a force more irresistible than Ozzie Smith and George Brett put together, even weekend World Series games begin after sundown now, and the umpires are in such a turmoil over working conditions, hectored as they are by television's instant replays, that they have turned to Richard Nixon.

The former President, father-in-law of a former statistician for the + Washington Senators, a former team, was appointed the arbitrator last week in the matter of the overextended playoffs. The league championship series were more than the umpires had bargained for. Nixon played football at Whittier College, but he has been around the language of hardball most of his life. "That was not my ball park. That was their ball park," Team Player John Mitchell once replied when asked about secret campaign funds. "In this Cabinet," Nixon observed, "you win some and you lose some." And some are rained out. As everyone knows, he has a working knowledge of both tapes and profanity, not to mention their potential for calamity.

Umpiring became an international crisis last week, when George Bell, a Toronto outfielder from the Dominican Republic, implied that baseball did not want a truly World Series and was conspiring against the Canadian semifinalist, which once employed a Canadian player. Nobody knows yet whether Arkansan Lloyd Moseby caught or trapped a crucial ball in centerfield, but that call and four or five other dubious ones went against Toronto. "If our ball club was American . . ." Bell grumbled three days before the Blue Jays finished squandering their 3-1 lead over Kansas City, thereby missing this week's date with St. Louis, to the edification of all Missouri. Others blamed the capricious officiating on the union's system of rotating umpires, many of whom are perfectly shaped for rotating, rather than appointing the most competent men to the most critical games. Even a number of the umpires seemed to concur with this. Of course, a cry has gone out again for incorporating replay technology into the sport, leaving the toughest decisions to "the man upstairs," as football's Tex Schramm solemnly refers to the fellow in the press box with the videocassette recorder.

Football is ideally suited for television and ordinarily susceptible to technology. "When you have the technology, damn it, you should use it," says Dallas Cowboys General Manager Schramm, a member of the National Football League's five-man "competition committee," which every off-season invades the Hawaiian islands in the pursuit of progress. The other mad scientists are Miami and Pittsburgh Coaches Don Shula and Chuck Noll, and Atlanta and Cincinnati Executives Eddie LeBaron and Paul Brown. "Every now and then," says Schramm, "we'll move out onto the grass and play like we're football players. Here we are, five strange men in shorts, demonstrating different ways ^ of holding each other." They get some unusual looks from passersby.

Wearing helmets fitted with sound systems, they race up and down the beach, elderly space cadets testing the future. Last week, amid all this atmosphere of detectable and therefore correctable mistakes, they attempted to persuade three-quarters of the league owners to install a "replay official" for the next football playoffs, recommending they limit his purview. "Only changes of possession, sideline plays, goal-line plays," Schramm urged, "things that are facts, whether the receiver's feet were down and he has fumbled, or whether they weren't and it's just an incomplete pass. No calling or reversing penalties, no arguing about judgment or guessing about anything at all. One hundred percent sure or go on to the next play."

As might be imagined, the Houston Oilers were among those who voted for science. Last month they were blatantly bilked out of two touchdowns and a victory over the Washington Redskins. Subsequently, the N.F.L. acknowledged what every television viewer already knew, that Receiver Drew Hill's feet had touched down in bounds. Controversies seem to be proliferating: the Jets and the Bengals had a few words over the definition of a safety. But in a flash of what may be wisdom, by just three votes, the league representatives elected to stick with the immediate judgment of human beings. As if, after looking at an exhaustive sequence of instant replays, they saw the proposition from enough angles to realize that certitude can diminish not only frame by frame but can be diminishing to the framework.

The vertical stripes of football officials have never been held to be as sacred as the blue serge of baseball umpires: football is not as romantic as baseball. A concept of rhubarbs is only precious to one game. As football continues to progress as a gambling medium, its fundamental place in the society now, perhaps public confidence or simple justice will require that electric eyes someday be implanted in the uprights of all goalposts. But more than preside over right and wrong, the baseball umpires must be right and wrong, or the quality of the game will have changed.