Eli5 Why do baseball players & coaches always argue with the referee?

Question

I always see clips of baseball players arguing with a referee and then getting ejected, but I’ve never once seen a coach or player convince a referee they’re wrong.

Why bother? Surely you know that you’re not gonna change their mind and that you can get ejected pretty easily and that gotta be worse than stifling your ego for a moment just copping the decision.

I’m Australian and don’t really watch baseball so I apologise if any nomenclature is incorrect.

In: 23

Answer 1

Humans aren’t perfect and any time you leave something up for interpretation there are going to be errors and poor judgement calls. Ideally we’d want a game that was perfectly refereed, but that will never happen with humans. As things go a referee will almost never (and really never should) change their call once it has been made, especially because someone didn’t like said call. That isn’t the real reason you go up and argue though… You go up and argue to try and change the referee’s mind which happens often honestly even if the call doesn’t change. Because at that point the referee knows a mistake has been made and often times this gives you some wiggle room later.

I play hockey so for me using a hockey example is a little bit easier to explain. Let’s say you have a player who gets called for tripping. A lot of times this is going to be a judgement call like was it intentional or was the defender making a play on the puck? So your team captain goes up to the referee to state his case about how he was making a play and it’s a bad call. Referee see’s his point and starts to doubt his own call but the point stands the penalty is given and the game goes on. Now 10 minutes later we have a situation where the same thing happens except this time it looks more like tripping than before. If it isn’t egregious and obviously a flagrant attempt, the referee is more likely to let this go because he “owes” them for the previous bad call. It’s not a rule set in stone or anything but it’s an attempt for the referee to make the game as “fair” as possible. So if they made a bad call that hurt you they may let you get away with a little more to “even it out” later.

If you don’t go up and argue with the ref then they might not think it was a bad call which means you don’t get the benefit of the doubt later.