Technology to kill tennis too

The last World Cup was the first time that I was ever really exposed to Socc^H^H^H^Hfootball. Those that partook in the single coolest thread on sports the Lounge has ever seen (which sadly our borked search function prevents me from finding), may recall my total hatred for the officiating I saw in the game. The referees were so blatantly biased and so much subjectivity went into calling the game that I received at least three noise violations for screaming at my television at four in the morning.

What astonished me was that this subjectivity was actually viewed by seasoned soccer fans as an almost cherished quirk of the sport, something I didn't really understand until the MLB rolled out their new electronic umpire evaluation system. For those not familiar, the system uses a series of cameras to determine whether or not an umpire's call is valid and the results are used to determine such things as which umpires get to call Series games. The end result has been significantly more consistent calls in individual games (and significantly more inconsistent calls by ballpark) at the sacrifice of certain pitcher's records and a total elimination of a quirk that plays a major part in baseball. When you remove, or minimize the human element of these games, you take a bit of the energy from the sport. I now understand the soccer lunatics a bit better.

The All England Club will use the Hawkeye system, aleady in place for another English sport none of you likely care about, cricket, to check line calls and eliminate the potential for variability among officiation in this year's Wimbledon. The impression I get from the marketing people behind Wimbledon is that this move was motivated far more by the desire to improve traffic to their web page than a sincere expectation of improving the game. It also brings a far more nefarious evil:

As it follows every ball in flight, the system will give a new set of statistics on bounce swerve and speed for commentators to mangle and reproduce at irrelevant moments.

As a stanch opponent of all announcers everywhere, that terrifies me. While the geek in me is certainly intrigued by the technologies used to objectively determine the position of a ball in a three dimensional world via advanced computer analysis of optical input, I can't help but think we're eliminating all the excitement of sports. What fun is watching a game if you can't get drunk with your friends and hurl obscenities, chicken wings and half full beer cans at your television in utter futility over a botched call?

Update: Shows how much I pay attention to my own fora, but the Football thread I referenced is apparently still chugging along.

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