Ball, or maybe strike, or something else

Wow. Now that was a great finish. Huge too, salvaging a split, especially with the Twins losing.

I will say one thing, though. Mike Everitt may not be the worst home-plate umpire in baseball, but if he's rated anywhere in the top 90%, it's as bad as I thought. When YES is running replays showing that strike three is actually a ball, you know the calls are bad.

To be fair, they weren't just phantom strikes. In the ninth inning, Everitt's strike zone shrank to about the size of Alex Rodriguez' confidence. The sooner that baseball can implement a strike-calling system like tennis has for line calls, or at least to determine over the plate vs. not over the plate, the better off the game will be.

"Personal" strike zones have always been a pet peeve of mine. All it means is that the umpires can't interpret the rules correctly, and that ever since Richie Phillips was the head of the umpires' union, the commissioner has been too scared to make them do anything (except for the one time most of the NL umps, I think, quit for a day and then didn't get their jobs back).

It's really easy. Make umpires call strikes by the book, or find umps who can.

That's just part of it, though. The real problem is that the game is simply too fast for umps any more. Too many pitchers throw 95-mph heat on either corner, and there's no way an umpire can make accurate calls on either side of the plate - they just pick a side, call that one the best they can, and guess at the other side, which they do as well as you or I do from the offset-center-field camera that provides the standard TV angle.

Too many games are decided by individual umpires' vagaries any more. Can you imagine if NBA refs used their judgment on a particular type of play that happened all the time? Oh wait, they actually do that. Can you imagine if, for example, NFL refs had different interpretations of what constituted a false start? Yeah, it'd be a disaster. But Tagliabue would have put a stop to that before it really began.

Baseball has too many things wrong with it that people believe are "part of the game." (I had a rant about beanballs on my temporary Fox Sports blog - I may move it here or retype it at some point.) Personal strike zones shouldn't be part of the game.

Even if the Tigers won anyway.