June 2, 2010 – So you’ve been standing behind first base for about an hour and forty minutes. You’ve noticed that not one visiting player has advanced from home plate to first. Twenty plus years of being a major league umpire has given you an uncanny baseball sense of what is going on around you, despite being stationed in the field for nine innings, practically incommunicado. But there’s the crowd murmur and the scoreboards and the first basemen and coaches chatter between innings.

Jim Joyce: “Hey, this Tiger pitcher has retired 26 straight. It’s two outs in the ninth. He gets this guy out and it’s a perfect game.”

So what kind of umpire, who is part of the fraternity with protection supplied by the leadership of the game (…no arguing balls and strikes…no instant replay…no use of electronic strike zone detectors…no bumping…), who is a representative of a group of judgement officials who brought us the phantom tag, the roving strike zone, the mystery fair/foul call, and the ‘in-the-area’ play, is loaded up on the 27th out of a perfect game, to make a call on a routine play at first base that spoils a once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece?

The answer is a bad umpire, which no one will say. He’s only human, but there’s something wrong with Jim Joyce. He had two options and he chose the one that will make him more famous in the long run than the guy who threw the perfect game. He knew what was going on around him and he chose not to make the correct call, but be the spoiler. Lesser umpires would have known what to do with that call even if it was bang-bang, indeterminably close, or even if the runner was safe by a hair, which wasn’t this case. “Yer out!” Game over.

He withstood the immediate barrage from the chirping Tiger’s first baseman, Miguel Cabrera and manager Jim Leyland. Like all umpires who have made their call, he stood smuggly, assured that he was right. The only thing surprising is that Joyce didn’t throw anyone out. But it was now clear that the game was about to be over and there was no sense adding insult to injury. Good judgement there, Jim.

When the game did end, the replay information had filtered to enough of the principals on the field that Joyce took on another barrage of criticism from heated Tiger players and coaches as he and his crew looked to leave the field. Joyce remained stoic. It seemed that by that time, the significance of his actions had sank in.

Within moments of leaving the field, Joyce had framed his commentary. One viewing of the replay in the umpire’s dressing room was all it took for him to author: “It was the biggest call of my career.” What that meant is that after his 20 plus years as an ump, he had just reached the same infamy heretofore reserved for guys like Don Denkinger. “Hi, I’m Jim Joyce, the moron who screwed up the perfect game.”

He was smart enough to go into damage control and contrite enough to say “I just cost that kid a perfect game,” and offer heartfelt apologies to Armando Galarraga and Leyland.

All he had to do was make the call. All he did was the one thing it took to spoil perfection. Like a graffiti artist defacing a just-completed Picasso, or a nurse dropping in a surgical sponge as doctors closed up after an intricate brain surgery. Jim Joyce is a knucklehead.