Bad Call: Technology's Attack on Referees and Umpires and How to Fix It
- ISBN-10
- 0262534444
- ISBN-13
- 9780262534444
- Series
- Bad Call
- Category
- Sports & Recreation
- Pages
- 295
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2017-09-01
- Publisher
- MIT Press
- Authors
- Robert Evans, Harry Collins, Christopher Higgins
Description
How technologies can get it wrong in sports, and what the consequences are—referees undermined, fans heartbroken, and the illusion of perfect accuracy maintained. Good call or bad call, referees and umpires have always had the final say in sports. Bad calls are more visible: plays are televised backward and forward and in slow motion. New technologies—the Hawk-Eye system used in tennis and cricket, for example, and the goal-line technology used in English football—introduced to correct bad calls sometimes get it right and sometimes get it wrong, but always undermine the authority of referees and umpires. Bad Call looks at the technologies used to make refereeing decisions in sports, analyzes them in action, and explains the consequences. Used well, technologies can help referees reach the right decision and deliver justice for fans: a fair match in which the best team wins. Used poorly, however, decision-making technologies pass off statements of probability as perfect accuracy and perpetuate a mythology of infallibility. The authors re-analyze three seasons of play in English Premier League football, and discover that goal line technology was irrelevant; so many crucial wrong decisions were made that different teams should have won the Premiership, advanced to the Champions League, and been relegated. Simple video replay could have prevented most of these bad calls. (Major League baseball learned this lesson, introducing expanded replay after a bad call cost Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game.) What matters in sports is not computer-generated projections of ball position but what is seen by the human eye—reconciling what the sports fan sees and what the game official sees.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2016-10-07
- 296 pages
- Paperback
- MIT Press
-
- 2016-09-30
- 296 pages
- Ebook
- MIT Press
Similar books
-
Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance
By Mike ScardinoBad Call is Mike Scardino's visceral, fast-moving, and mordantly funny account of the summers he spent working as an "ambulance attendant" on the mean streets of late-1960s New York.
-
Bad Call
By Stephen WallenfelsIt was supposed to be epic. During a late-night poker game, tennis teammates Colin, Ceo, Grahame, and Rhody make a pact to go on a camping trip in Yosemite National...
-
Don't Call Me Goon: Hockey's Greatest Enforcers, Gunslingers, and Bad Boys
By Greg Oliver, Richard KamchenWhether they are called upon to duke it out with a fellow troublemaker or intimidate an opponent’s top scorer, these are the men who get the crowds to their feet, the sports radio shows buzzing, and the TV audience spilling their beers in ...
-
Pod
By Stephen WallenfelsA "fast-paced and engrossing" (Publishers Weekly) sci-fi novel that asks the question: What would you do to survive?
-
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
By Richard RumeltArgues that a manager's central responsibility is to create and implement strategies, challenges popular motivational practices, and shares anecdotes discussing how to enable action-oriented plans for real-world results.
-
One Bad Call
By Keith WheelerIf softball is 'just a game', how can her friendships, her family and her dreams all be destroyed by One Bad Call? Scroll Up and Buy Your Copy of One Bad Call, Today!
-
Don't Call Us Dead: Poems
By Danez SmithDigte. Addresses race, class, sexuality, faith, social justice, mortality, and the challenges of living HIV positive at the intersection of black and queer identity
-
One Bad Call
By Keith WheelerIf softball is 'just a game', how can her friendships, her family and her dreams all be destroyed by One Bad Call? Scroll Up and Buy Your Copy of One Bad Call, Today!
-
Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
By Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. WestIn Calling Bullshit, Professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West give us a set of powerful tools to cut through the most intimidating data. You don’t need a lot of technical expertise to call out problems with data.
-
The Biggest Disability Is a Bad Attitude: Why They Call Me the Confidence Coach and How I Can Help You
By Scott BallardWhen Scott Ballard started school, his teachers told him he would never amount to anything.