Bad Call: Technology's Attack on Referees and Umpires and How to Fix It by Harry Collins, Robert Evans, and Christopher Higgins (review)

I love to watch sports and still listen on the radio. I grew up in Pittsburgh, the home of the first live baseball radio broadcast on 5 August 1921 (my beloved Pirates beat the Philadelphia Phillies that day, 8-5). My very first memory is seeing on TV Bill Mazeroski hit a ninth-inning, seventh-game homerun in the 1960 baseball World Series to smite the mighty New York Yankees 10-9 and take the series. Over the years, I have watched too much sports on TV, although not the cricket, football (soccer), and tennis that figure largely in Bad Call, but with the same growing concern about both whether bad calls have an impact on the outcome of games and what to do if that were the case. I had no idea about the intimate relationship between technologies of transmission, especially cameras, and the adjudication of potential referees' errors, nor of the ontological and epistemological questions that can help determine what to do.

Bad Call commences with a discussion of "justice and decision-making" in sports and with a philosophy lesson on ontology and epistemology (of sports) that the authors would like "to be among the things discussed in the pub after a game." The authors welcome the fact that referees and umpires (hereafter "referees") have "epistemological privilege" because of their better view of events and extensive training, and likely will be fair and neutral. The authors worry about the ways in which new technologies seem to have degraded the epistemological privilege of the arbiters. TV screens large and small, public and private, have given fans and other observers this privilege. And this has unfortunately led to loss of credibility of the referee and the sports outcomes at times, too.

The authors remind us of presumptive justice that plays a role here: we have faith in the system and so trust decisions even if we have not ourselves seen what is happening/has happened with our own eyes. The authors meticulously explain that high technology cannot resolve problems—for example, with such sports with balls that are filled with air and hence squashy—nor does accuracy to a millimeter exist. They discuss the technology and philosophy of track estimators in cricket and tennis.

The authors argue that the problem of "technology's attack on referees" has an easy fix. Measurement is always subject to error, decision-aid technologies are not always accurate, and they should not be considered an infallible replacement for human judgment. They argue that philosophical thinking can help by replacing the sports fan's obsession for accuracy with a desire for justice. They call for RINOWN as a solution—Right If Not Wrong. The referees must continue to create balls and strikes, outs and not-outs, and call offsides as before. If some technology comes along that reveals their mistakes to a wide audience, third officials can use it to put the matter right. But under RINOWN this should be done only quickly and if the error is glaringly obvious.

One of the most intriguing moments in this book is the discussion of the significant financial, championship, and relegation consequences of various off-side, foul, hand-ball, yellow and red cards, penalty shots, and other referees' calls that occurred from 2011–14 in the British Premier League. The authors look at "justice and heartbreak" in over 1,000 games to conclude that winners would have been different in two out of three seasons; in one season a different team would have played in the European Championship League; and that one relegated team would have stayed in the senior league and one would likely have been dropped down. Appendix 3, over 100 pages of this approximately 275-page book, provides summary of this material. The index is rather thin at two pages...