Awful Umpiring: The Human Element, They Said

Is this the worst postseason umpiring we've seen since Eric Gregg and Livan Hernandez?

We've seen some great baseball this October...and no one's talking about it. That's because we've seen so many egregiously wrong calls that, really, who can talk about anything else?

Already in tonight's game we've seen one of those runners up top get called safe somehow, Nick Swisher erroneously being called safe sliding back into second, and Swisher then getting erroneously nailed for leaving third too early while tagging up. Video evidence only confirms what millions of human eyes saw.

What's the deal here? These haven't been bang-bang calls by any means. They're not calls that we'd expect our worst umpires to miss, so it's not a matter of having the wrong guys working the game.

Is this like a batter's slump? Has one blown call affected the confidence of the entire postseason staff, and they're trying too hard? And more importantly, when are we getting instant replay?

[Much love to The Replacement Refs for help with the screengrabs.]

Send an email to Barry Petchesky, the author of this post, at barryp@deadspin.com.

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