Juicing the Game by Howard Bryant

Author:Howard Bryant
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

LARRY GIBSON was born and raised in Baltimore. He went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., and came of age during the 1960s, when the Baltimore Orioles were rising to power in the American League. Yet he was never attracted to baseball, freely admitting that he knew very little about the game. While at Columbia Law, he clerked for Maryland state judge Frank Kaufman, where he would become best friends with Ron Shapiro. Shapiro would become a well-known player agent in both baseball and football. For a time, the two friends worked together in Shapiro’s agency. Gibson recalled that, in one of the few baseball games he attended, in one half inning, all nine Orioles players on the field were Shapiro clients.

Gibson was a tenured professor at University of Maryland Law and a veteran of Democratic politics, having been Bill Clinton’s state chairman during the 1992 presidential election and having served as campaign manager for venerable Baltimore mayor Curt Schmoke on three occasions. When Richie Phillips’s strategy began its fatal meltdown in 1999, the group of dissenters led by Joe Brinkman and John Hirschbeck paid a call to Ron Shapiro for the purpose of organizing a new union. From time to time Shapiro had also represented umpires, but, fearing a conflict of interest because he still represented players, he asked Larry Gibson to serve as counsel to the umpires. That is how a man with so little knowledge of baseball that his own clients, the umpires, would constantly make fun of him found himself standing face-to-face with the power players of Major League Baseball.

By the time Ralph Nelson signed the QuesTec deal, Gibson had already negotiated a collective-bargaining agreement between the umpires and baseball with Sandy Alderson and Rob Manfred. When he heard the QuesTec announcement, he was not particularly alarmed; baseball had assured the umpires that the technology was to be used only as a training tool.

In 2001 and 2002, as baseballs flew out of the park, QuesTec’s influence grew at the office of the commissioner. The data retrieved from the handful of parks that had installed QuesTec revealed that umpires missed one of every nine pitches, a fairly high number. To the umpires, it was a preposterous number. These were not borderline calls; QuesTec’s data suggested the calls were dead wrong.

Gibson had immediate reservations. The mood was already darkening with Alderson and Manfred, for by 2002, Alderson had become convinced that the lengthening time of games, now averaging more than three hours, was due to umpires’ not calling enough strikes. Alderson ordered the umpires to call more strikes. Gibson immediately filed suit against baseball.

Gibson was leery of QuesTec. He attended seven Yankees games in the seven different parks where QuesTec was installed, and one Phillies game. As an experiment, he chose to focus on the strike zones of Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Alfonso Soriano, and Jason Giambi. His first immediate fear was realized: The QuesTec strike zone fluctuated. On its face, that seemed only logical. Jason Giambi would

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