Is the ump blind?

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Nobody is watching the World Series to see the umpires. Yet in the post-season competitions that have produced this week's final showdown between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies, the game's authority figures have repeatedly drawn attention to themselves with judgment calls that seem almost ludicrously off-base.

In an endless series of TV replays and YouTube clips, these so-called professionals have been revealed as incompetent. New York Yankee Nick Swisher leaves third base the moment a Los Angeles Angels outfielder catches a pop-up, in accordance with the sacrifice-fly rule, but umpire Tim McClelland rules he left too early. Angels catcher Mike Napoli tags out the Yankees' Jorge Posada and Robinson Cano, who have comically converged at third base and failed to maintain contact with it - yet only one of them is called out. A line drive off the bat of Minnesota Twins slugger Joe Mauer falls well within fair territory, but umpire Phil Cuzzi confidently indicates it landed foul.

Can major-league umps really be as blind as the cheap-seat catcallers insist they are?

Psychologists who study visual perception and understand the profound limitations of the eye are much more forgiving. "I know it's the least-satisfying explanation for baseball fans," says David Rainey of John Carroll University in Ohio, "but the fact is that they're human."

Umpires may develop techniques to block out the crowd noise and the nagging performance anxieties in their head. But they can never escape the limitations imposed by the tools of their trade, their eyes. "We don't really see what we think we can see," says Jay Pratt, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. "In my field, it's a well-known saying that humans are mostly blind most of the time."

Although we have a visual range of about 150 degrees, most of what the eyes see are blobs of brightness and darkness. For highly detailed information, we can call on only a two-to-three-degree range in the very centre of our sightline. Humans make up for this limitation by moving our eyes constantly, about 200,000 times a day. But when we have to become attentive to one part of the visual field, we become prone to misjudgments.

An umpire has to decide if a runner left third base before an outfielder caught a fly ball. But in fact he can't see both actions in the same way. "An umpire has to choose which one to go with," Prof. Pratt says, "and that way there will always be a bias in perception."

How do psychologists know this? They ask subjects to look at a computer screen, and then to pay attention to the left side of their visual field without moving their eyes. When two images are put on the screen at the same time, the test subject will insist that the image on the side they were paying attention to arrived first, by a 10th of a second or more. A 10th of a second, to a slow-motion replay camera, is an agonizingly long period of time over which an umpire's inadequacies can be thoroughly exposed.

Many umpiring mistakes fit into this category. A more striking gaffe occurs when an umpire fails to see what happens right in front of his eyes: Umpire Tim McClelland stood by as the two Yankees, Mr. Posada and Mr. Cano, were caught off-base and tagged after a complex run-down play, then called only Mr. Posada out. Surely this can't be defended?

Yet as Prof. Rainey points out, a run-down play is "highly confusing" - a player badly overshoots a base, desperately reverses his steps, and then gets chased down in a series of back-and-forth feints, slowly sacrificing himself as the runner behind him advances to the base during the confusion. "It's baseball's version of a sleight-of-hand-trick," says Mike Stadler, author of The Psychology of Baseball .

An experienced umpire knows he has to concentrate intently. "But if you have a notion that you're looking for a certain event to happen," Prof. Pratt says, "you will miss other events. With things that don't fit what we call the attentional-control set, you can look directly at them, getting stimulation on your retina, and yet they won't reach your awareness."

In a classic experiment, people asked to concentrate on counting the number of passes in a ball-tossing video fail to see the interloper in a gorilla suit who appears on the screen and thumps her chest. Mr. McClelland likewise was fixated on the likely outcome of the run-down, in which the trailing runner would presumably deliver himself safely to third in the time-honoured baseball way - what Prof. Rainey calls "a confirmation of expectation." And so, even though he was looking right at the successful tag, he ruled Mr. Cano safe.

Calling a ball foul that landed fair - as Mr. Cuzzi did - seems even more outrageous. But what looks clear-cut on TV replays was much more challenging in the milliseconds available to the umpire - blink, and you miss it. The key to understanding this mistake is to assume that Mr. Cuzzi momentarily lost visual contact with the ball as he turned and ran toward where it appeared to be heading. "When you start the eye in motion," Prof. Pratt notes, "you stop processing visual information."

The ball hit by Mr. Mauer was curving quickly toward the foul line. Mr. Cuzzi was stationed in an unfamiliar place down the left field line, an umpiring position not used in the regular season. As the ball left the bat, he had to turn and perform the complex calculus of running toward where he expected it to land and picking up its difficult flight. Even then, it looked likely to land foul if it had not hit the glove of sprinting outfielder Melky Cabrera.

The key to understanding this mistake is to assume that Mr. Cuzzi momentarily lost visual contact with the ball as he turned and ran. "When you start the eye in motion," Prof. Pratt notes, "you stop processing visual information."

That lapse, Prof. Stadler says, "would create a bias effect. His initial impression is that it's heading foul. If anything happens to obscure his perception of events, the first guess biases what he sees."

This isn't a conscious choice or a decision - simply how the human eye works in real time under difficult circumstances. Prof. Rainey calls it understandable, sounding much more like a seen-it-all scientist than an unforgiving fan. "Their margin for error is so tiny."