Schrodinger’s Umpire

One of the big stories of the past week of baseball has been the questionable quality of the umpiring, so I contacted the American Umpiring Institute to see if I could glean any insight about some of the more controversial calls.  I received a cordial reply from Dr. Klaus von Aushall, who acts as a public relations liaison for the Institute, and here are his answers to some of my questions:

The Connoisseur: Let’s start with a general overview question: what the Sam Hill is going on with the umpiring in the playoff games thus far?

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: You ask a valid question, but what you might not know is just how thorough our umpires’ training is.  There are many things that the lay fan does not realize about how difficult an umpire’s job is, and in recent years, we’ve incorporated some of the most cutting-edge thinking in the fields of sports, arbitration, and modern physics to make our umpires the most well-rounded and forward-thinking in the world.

The Connoisseur: The sports and arbitration seem reasonably well-defined, but it seems that the normal Newtonian classical mechanics would be sufficient for the job of officiating a major-league baseball game …

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Ah, a common misconception.  Take, for example, the foul ball call on Joe Mauer’s drive down the left field line.

The Connoisseur: Yes, that’s a call I had in mind.

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Did you realize that the Earth, with a circumference of approximately 25,000 miles, rotates on its axis in just under 24 hours?  This means that a point on the equator is traveling nearly 0.29 miles per SECOND.  Translated into feet, this is more than 1500 feet per second.  Now, New York is at approximately the 40 degree mark in latitude, meaning that the rotation speed is no more than three-quarters of this, but the point is, in just one millisecond, the foul line in New Yankee Stadium will have rotated over a foot.  Accounting for this, it is perfectly reasonable to think that you saw the ball about to land fair, but in reality, it was a FOUL ball, and then, in a millisecond, the Earth rotated underneath it, making it APPEAR to land on the other side of the foul line.  It is this kind of understanding of rotational mechanics that separates the lay fan from one of our umpires.

The Connoisseur: Wait, didn’t the ball have the same initial rotational velocity …

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: And think: if the umpire hadn’t been situated right there on the base line, how many more milliseconds might have gone by: the ball might have landed in the stands, or center field, depending on the orientation of the stadium.

The Connoisseur: That … that doesn’t make any sense at all.  And isn’t that just classical mechanics, anyway?

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Yes, but what about the call with the ball appearing to brush Brandon Inge’s jersey in the Game 163 play-in game?

The Connoisseur: Again, this appears to be a question of inelastic collisions.

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Only to the small-minded cretin.  Instead, consider this in terms of quantum mechanical probability functions.  In fact, what you had there was the exceedingly rare, but still non-zero probability, example of quantum tunnelling.

The Connoisseur: Quantum what?

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Yes, see, this is just the sort of thing non-umpires cannot easily comprehend: in fact, this was a case in which the wave functions of the ball and Inge’s jersey produced an unlikely, but perfectly mathematically consistent, result in which the ball actually traveled THROUGH the jersey without producing any interaction effects.

The Connoisseur: You mean, it went through the jersey … without touching the jersey.

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Exactly.

The Connoisseur: What are the chances of that?

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: It happens more often than you’d think.

The Connoisseur: It couldn’t possibly happen LESS often than I think.

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: You said it, not me.

The Connoisseur: About the other “ball strikes body” play …

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Chase Utley hitting the ball off his leg?

The Connoisseur: Yes, that’s a foul ball, right?

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Ah, but here, we need to take into account the lessons of string theory.

The Connoisseur: String theory?

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Yes, in these cases, it is incumbent on the umpire to discern whether contact was made in at least 8 of the 11 dimensions string theory describes.

The Connoisseur: 8 of 11?

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: It isn’t quite the three-fourths we like in general, but it is the lowest number of dimensions we can use and still get a super-majority of more than two-thirds.

The Connoisseur: So the ball hit Utley …

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: In no more than 6 dimensions.  The replays, run through the metaoscillohydroheliospectroscope, clearly show this.

The Connoisseur: Clearly.

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Without a shadow of a doubt.

The Connoisseur: No doubt.

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: It’s true.

The Connoisseur: Does the umpire have access to one of these devices during the game?

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: No, but then, we would hate to remove any of the human element from the game.

The Connoisseur: And so when you say, “six dimensions,” would that include the three visible spatial dimensions and the one measurable forward-linear time dimension?

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Yes, well, this cannot be helped: it is why having an experienced umpire behind the plate is so crucial, to be able to distinguish what the lay fan cannot.

The Connoisseur: And the subsequent missing of the call at first base, where Utley was out anyway?

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Ah, another common misconception.  Here, the relevant principle is relativistic effects.  Because we are using light rays, photon streams, if you will, to give us the necessary biofeedback to give us the input necessary to make our decisions.  But if the Lorentz Transformation is incorrectly applied, you’ll end up making the wrong call.

The Connoisseur: I wasn’t aware that relativity needed to be applied here.

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Well, yes: he was relatively safe.

The Connoisseur: Does this help explain the calls with Kevin Youkilis at first base with Howie Kendrick?

Dr. Klaus von Aushall: Well, that’s just a putrid call.  It happens, y’know?

The Connoisseur: Yeah.  As a matter of fact, I do.

Steve Buffum works as a data cudgeller in Austin, TX, where he lives with his wife and three children. He writes a regular column for The Cleveland Fan and remembers his knees fondly.