The Psychology of Being a Bad Umpire, and Why You Should Swing for the Fences

Why do sports teams have an advantage when they’re playing at home? Consider the case of the provocative Portuguese soccer manager José Mourinho. Before April 2, when Real Madrid lost 1-0 at home to Sporting Gijón, no team of Mourinho’s had lost a home league game for more than nine years. Four different clubs, four different countries (Madrid, Porto, Chelsea and Inter Milan), 150 matches: not one home game lost. Could it have been his flamboyant clothes?

Maybe. David Runciman, writing in the London Review of Books about a new volume on the subject, Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won, isn’t so sure what the reason is. In freakonomics style, authors Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim consider fans, travel, and local knowledge but find the real culprit to be referees afraid to offend the hometown crowd. But Runciman tears that theory apart too, offers his own (teams feel more spirit at home), and then lands on a related problem for tightly-contested games: omission bias, a phenomenon that we all know as the tendency to avoid risk and not act in tense situations.

If a referee intervenes in a game near the end, it looks like he's deciding the outcome. That's going to make some people mad. Moskowitz and Wertheim describe a classic sporting example of what can happen when an official tries to overcome his or her omission bias. At the 2009 US Open a brave/foolhardy tennis line judge called a foot-fault against Serena Williams at the climax of her semi-final against Kim Clijsters. Subsequent replays showed the call was correct. But it provoked outrage. Line judges rarely call foot-faults, since they don't want to look conspicuous. What was this one doing interposing herself at such a crucial moment in the match and helping to decide the outcome? Just doing her job? Come on – she was making a spectacle of herself. After she had been foot-faulted, Williams turned on the official and screamed at her: 'You better be fucking right! You don't fucking know me! … If I could, I would take this fucking ball and shove it down your fucking throat!' This outburst meant Williams was docked a point, which cost her the match. The crowd went crazy. John McEnroe commentating on television, agreed: 'You can't call that there. Not at that point in the match.' So it turns out it didn't matter that the line judge was fucking right; she was still run out of town. As Moskowitz and Wertheim show, most officials have internalised these sorts of lesson. They don't like to interpose themselves at crucial moments, when people can say: it was the goddam ump! They don't even like to make calls at any point in a game when their decision will stand out. So, for instance, in baseball, when an umpire has made three consecutive calls against the pitcher, meaning one more 'ball' (a pitch called outside the strike-zone) will give the batter a free walk to first base, he usually shies away from making the call. Better to call a strike, so it doesn't look like the umpire has dominated that little period of play. This has important implications. It's a truism of baseball coaching that when hitters are at 3-0 (three balls, no strikes) they shouldn't swing at the next pitch. Don't waste a dominant position. Make the pitcher, who is under all the pressure, get it over the plate. But in fact the umpire, who's really the one under pressure, will probably see the ball as going over the plate regardless of whether it is or not. So the truism is false – you're better off swinging. This lesson can be applied to many areas of life. Say you're going to a job interview. You know you're the outstanding candidate, so you decide to play it safe. But if you really are the outstanding candidate, the umpires are unlikely to want to strike you out on the basis of a single interview. So you might as well swing for the fences.

Read the whole piece at LRB

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Shawn Kimball