Ken Kaiser: The Anti-Jim Joyce
"I'm not going to cry on the news and tell everybody I'm sorry for what I did."
We now have the proper antagonist to begin work on the screenplay...
It took a couple of days, but finally we're reminded why some umpires rub us the wrong way.
You know that universally approved remorse that Jim Joyce has shown since blowing the biggest call of his life? It turns out it's not as universal as once thought.
If you don't remember Ken Kaiser from his many years in the game, well then he's about to give you something new to remember him by.
A high octane interview with the Michael Kay radio show in New York City that begins with a bashing of Joyce's actions following the missed call:
"First of all, I'm not going to cry on the news and tell everybody I'm sorry for what I did. If I missed it, I missed it. Do I hope I miss it? Well, hell no, I don't hope I miss it. Do I feel bad I missed it? Well, I figure, I made about 2 thousand calls this year that I got right and nobody came in my dressing room and patted me on the back. And now I kick one and I'm supposed to... you know it reminds me of Tiger Woods, 'Hey, you had a problem in your family. Let's all talk about it.'"
Totally reminds me of Tiger Woods. It also reminds me of Aquaman and Cinnamon Toast Crunch and... anything else that randomly pops into my head.
Kaiser then takes his head of steam, wheels around, and starts charging back in defense of the umpire.
"You know this is ridiculous. The commissioner has turned this game into... I don't know what you want to call it. The game's out of the hands of the umpires. You can't control the game. Hey, Jimmy didn't want to miss that play. Actually, if anybody knows anything about our job, he wasn't out of position, he was a victim of circumstances."
"When that ball was hit down the line, it looked like the 2nd baseman was going to field the ball so Jimmy couldn't get the angle that he wanted to get."
At this point, Kaiser takes the shield he was protecting Joyce with, turns it sideways, and offers one more shot to the temple.
"Am I sorry about it if I'm an umpire and that was my call? I certainly didn't like doing it but I'm not going to go home at night and cry to my family and the kids that I kicked a play. No, this game was built on human error and on human mistakes that can't be helped. This game is 155 years old and it was okay for that long. Now we're going to bring in instant replay. We're going to get the umpires in the middle of the field. We're all going to play the NFL, 'What'd you see, Harry? What'd you see, Joe?' They're destroying the game."
He's right. The NFL is a terrible model to use for anything. No one watches that garbage.
"Now we've got fantasy baseball. We got gambling on sports. We got everything that's gotta be perfect now because I bet the milk money on this game. Now, 'My son's not going to have a glass of milk because that umpire kicked that play at 2nd base.' This is the problem with these games now that you're taking the human element out of the game."
It's all making sense to me now. There's more pressure now because, unlike 50 years ago, people gamble on sports. There was no such thing as betting until covers.com was invented.
"They're going to mess around with this game so much that nobody's going to care."
They may not care about baseball anymore, Ken Kaiser, but we all care very much about you. I don't know where you've been since that botched mass resignation attempt in 1999, but please come back as often as you like.
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