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

There’s three reasons. The first is that you’re pissed off and you don’t really care.

The second is that it can help you later on in the game or series. If the umpire gets an earful because he called that pitch a strike when it should have been a ball there’s a chance that he’s going to be more attentive to that for the rest of the game. Umpires work in teams, and while each umpire does a different job each day, you may have the same team for an entire series, so the other umpires may be more attentive to that issue as well.

The third is that sometimes a well timed ejection can change the energy of a game. It can get the crowd going or fire up the team to see their manager out there fighting for them. There’s been plenty of times where a manager went out to argue with an umpire with the explicit goal of getting ejected to fire up the team. There’s even been a few instances where a manager explicitly told an umpire that they were trying to get ejected and the umpire doing so.

EDIT: There is a fourth reason as well, which is that some players and managers are crazy. For example Yankees manager Billy Martin, known for being ejected frequently, was a great manager who was also, for lack of a better word, a complete psycho. Martin was the Yankees manager *five different times*, all under the same owner, George Steinbrenner (who was also crazy). George Steinbrenner hired Billy Martin, fired him, re-hired him, fired him again, re-hired him again, fired him yet again, hired him for a fourth time, fired him a fourth time, hired him a *fifth* time, then fired him for a fifth (and final) time after Martin got blitzed at a hotel bar in Baltimore and fought one of his players, who broke Martin’s arm.