Stop Complaining About Referees
7 min read
From the very first batter of the game, the coach was giving the umpire a hard time. It was a Little League game, and the kids were 10. The umpire was maybe 16. “You sure?” the coach kept asking, about virtually every call, even when the ump was clearly right. “You sure about that?” Meanwhile the kids on the bench were going wild—climbing the dugout fence, goofing off, paying no attention to the game. Instead of controlling them, the coach was needling the ump.
I’ve been coaching Little League for four years, and watching professional sports for four decades, and I see this sort of thing now more than ever. Fans, athletes, coaches, parents, precocious children who read The Atlantic, please hear my plea: Stop complaining about umpires. (And referees, and officials of any kind who enforce the rules.) Just stop.
Hitters in the big leagues grumble about strikes at least a couple of times per game, and pitchers have perfected their death stare. Pro soccer players act as if they’ve never once fallen down of their own accord. Based on Luka Dončić’s behavior in the NBA Finals, which his Dallas Mavericks lost in five games to the Boston Celtics, every foul call against him was a travesty. And the only way for athletes to correct these miscarriages of justice is to pitch a fit and make the money gesture to the crowd, implying that the referee is not just blind but crooked, too.
Too many fans are as pouty as the athletes. A home-plate umpire at the Major League Baseball level has to make instant judgments about pitches that travel at 100 miles an hour—and that’s when the ball goes in a straight line. They also curve, sweep, and plummet across the plate at 90. The umpire’s job is to decide whether the ball clipped the edge of an invisible box that changes shape with the dimensions of each successive hitter. Watching at home with the benefit of both instant replay and that floating strike zone on the screen, we lose our minds when an ump with neither of these advantages misses a call by a few millimeters.
Perhaps you’re thinking: So what? These are just games. Yes and no. Sports are indeed a parallel universe in which we get to unleash raw emotions and act out in ways we never would in civil society—but they also reveal how we behave under pressure, in the spotlight. And at the risk of being the old man shaking his fist at a cloud, I have to point out that our kids are absorbing all of our bad behavior.
Anyone who’s been to a Little League game in the past decade has witnessed the effect on youth sports. We’re raising a generation of aggrieved kids who have learned from their heroes to feel entitled to complain about every call, as if acceptance were for chumps. We’re teaching them not just to disrespect authority figures but to disdain them; that the people who labor to uphold the rules are sanctimonious stooges of a rigged system; and that life is just a series of blown calls.
Aside from tax collectors, meter maids, and politicians, umpires and referees might be the most disliked people in public life. It’s a wonder anyone signs up for the job. We all say that we believe in fairness, that few things matter more, and yet we abuse and vilify the people who enforce it. That’s because we’re liars. We don’t want to believe that the world is a fair place; we want to believe that it’s rigged against us, because then we don’t have to feel responsible for our own failures.
Make no mistake, athletes fail at a far greater rate than the officials. As of this season’s MLB All Star break, in mid-July, Aaron Judge, the most fearsome hitter in baseball, has played in 934 career games, has 955 career hits, and has struck out 1,146 times. The best shooters in the NBA miss close to half their shots. There’s a saying in football that someone on both sides of the ball makes a mistake on every single play.
Umpires at the major-league level, meanwhile, get more than 94 percent of their calls correct, according to the tracking site Umpire Scorecards. Umps are better now than they’ve ever been, largely thanks to advanced analytics and tracking technology, which allow officials to study their habits and improve their performance. And yet the more they get right, the worse we seem to think they are, and the angrier we get at them. When an athlete screws up, we say: Put it behind you. You’ll get ’em next time. No one ever says such encouraging words to umpires. Instead we burn them at the stake. Replay review—a process meant to bring unilateral justice to our competitions—has only made it worse. Sports fans are a crew of blundering idiots screaming curses at savants, and we get more obnoxious with every beer we drink.
Consider the fate of the former MLB umpire Ángel Hernández, who retired this spring, ending a two-decade run as the most hated man in baseball. If you surveyed players and fans, he would’ve been the consensus pick for the worst umpire in the game, even though, by most statistical metrics, he was merely below average. To be fair, Hernández was loathed not just because he was subpar, but because he also picked fights and seemed to relish drawing attention to himself. It did real damage to his career. He was an umpire at the MLB level for 33 years, but he was never formally promoted to crew chief, and not for lack of trying.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, an umpire named Pat Hoberg once called a perfect game behind the plate—129 pitches in total, every single one correct—during Game 2 of the 2022 World Series. According to Umpire Scorecards, it was the first perfect game since the site began tracking calls in 2019. Hoberg is consistently one of MLB’s finest umpires. During the 2022 season, his overall accuracy was a league-best 95.5 percent. If you surveyed 100 baseball fans, though, and asked them who Pat Hoberg is, I’d wager that at least 95.5 percent of them would have no idea.
Officials in all walks of life can be haughty. They can be condescending and confrontational. It takes a certain kind of person to do these jobs, to withstand this kind of abuse, and many of their personality traits are not endearing. But the refs aren’t supposed to be liked. Their job is to tell athletes something they don’t want to hear and order them to shut up if they complain about it. That’s no way to make friends. But they’re essential to the games we love, and we need to start acting like it.
This is especially important at the Little League level, where many umps are teenagers, getting paid maybe $20 an hour to be bullied by adults. If you’ve ever coached, you are well aware that parents are a nightmare. Their behavior routinely embarrasses their children. One father I coached with—an otherwise great guy—would often mutter about calls on pitches to the inside or outside of the strike zone, even though we had the worst angle on the field, perpendicular to the plate, while the umpire was in the ideal position mere inches away. The father would ask me what I thought of the call, and I always gave the same answer: I really can’t tell from this angle. Neither could he. The result was a lineup full of kids who rolled their eyes at called strikes over the middle of the plate, because they learned it from us.
Once this season, when I was coaching third base, one of our kids pulled up safely at the bag and then, for some reason, took his foot two inches off the base. “Your foot’s not on the base!” I yelped, three times. He didn’t budge, and got tagged out. Without looking down, he insisted to me and to the ump that his foot was on the base. “It still isn’t on the base,” I said, then proceeded to rip out every hair on my head, one by one.
This child wasn’t confused. He was trying, ineptly, to deceive the umpire. For all their complaints about unfairness, athletes turn into con artists the moment a game begins. NBA players flop to draw fouls, a practice that became so routine that the league outlawed it, not that it stops anyone. Soccer players get their foot grazed by an opponent and writhe on the grass in agony, and then once it has become clear that the referee isn’t falling for their ruse, they get up and trot away. Catchers in baseball are trained to move their glove ever so slightly after receiving a pitch in order to trick the umpire into calling a strike. It’s called “pitch framing,” and it’s a coveted skill. A retired MLB umpire told me once that he and his colleagues routinely referred to players as “rats” because they were so untrustworthy and dishonorable. Not only do we expect officials to be perfect, but we expect it amid a sea of athletes doing whatever they can to mislead them.
Look, no one who knows me well would describe me as even-tempered. But I never complain about officiating. Partly this is because I know that the refs are doing their best and that they’re taking enough abuse already. But the core reason is a mixture of karma and math: If you’re on the crummy side of a blown call today, you’ll be on the fortunate side tomorrow. Over the course of a game, over the course of a season, over the course of a life, we all get screwed and we all get our share of lucky breaks. Being an adult means accepting that sometimes fairness is unfair, but that it all evens out in the end.
