PHILADELPHIA — Over his 39 years as an NBA referee, Joey Crawford, as far as he could recall, received just two or three death threats. He didn’t take them seriously, and he doesn’t remember hearing a fan or fans screaming at him from the stands about point spreads.

“They wouldn’t scream it, or I was oblivious to it,” Crawford, a Havertown, Pa., native, said by phone the other day. “We’re accused of that kind of stuff anyway. It goes in one ear and out the other. But you’ve got to be a complete moron if you don’t notice it in the sports world today.”

Yep, it’s everywhere — traditional gambling and daily fantasy and prop bets, a flood unleashed ever since May 2018, when the Supreme Court, in Murphy v. NCAA, ruled that a law banning gambling outside of Nevada was unconstitutional. The problems are manifold and multiplying, and even a recent development that was regarded as a net positive for Major League Baseball should have been tinged with a sense of foreboding.

Angel Hernandez “retired” — that was the official term — as a major-league umpire last week, and the public reaction was so celebratory that you’d have thought that all 30 franchises had won the World Series at the same time. Hernandez wasn’t good at his job, and he seemed particularly arrogant even in the face of his own relative incompetence. A bad ump is no longer an ump. Great. What’s the problem?

In the here and now, there isn’t one. But Hernandez’s departure and the reaction to it highlight why Major League Baseball, the NBA, and every other major sports league or association ought to do all they can to automate as much officiating as possible as soon as possible. Get robots to call balls and strikes. Get sensors to determine whether the guy who grabbed the rebound stepped on the baseline, whether Jalen Hurts actually gained enough inches on a quarterback sneak for a first down.

Remove what should be cut and dried and objective from the purview of referees and umpires. Do it all, and do it as fast as you can, for two reasons.

One, in a world in which billions of dollars are legally wagered on sports, a league has to eliminate every possible occasion in which an official’s lapse in judgment might affect the course or outcome of a competition. Human error had a certain charm before technology and replay reviews allowed everyone to see exactly what happened on every play. Now, for better or worse, a league has so much revenue tied up in betting that it can’t afford to have a result be perceived as illegitimate because of an official’s obvious mistake.

You’ll never get rid of all such calls, of course; one ref’s hand-check might be another ref’s reach-in foul. But you can get rid of a lot of them, and it’s in those situations that incompetence or, worse, impropriety has its most profound impact.

The NBA was already infected by one corrupt referee — Tim Donaghy — and the temptation for a similar scandal is even greater now that so many of the cultural guardrails are gone. A ref or ump can’t worry first and foremost anymore about replay undermining his or her authority. Accuracy and integrity have to be paramount.

“When you’re the ref, you want the plays to be correct,” Crawford said. “We’re going to make mistakes, and it’s really not a bad cushion to have. ‘Give me that out-of-bounds play.’ You look at it, and if it’s overturned, you’re relieved when that happens. ‘Oh, boy, thank God.’”

Two, the flip side of the happiness over the end of Hernandez’s career is the anger that people within baseball, the sport’s fans, and — let’s be honest here — bettors felt toward him while he was calling games. For every viral video that got people laughing over how absurd Hernandez’s strike zone often was, there were likely hundreds of degenerate gamblers cursing his name and blaming him for their losses.

Already, abuse toward pro and college basketball players — verbal during games, digital through social media — has soared as the number of bettors has increased. The longer that critical calls remain in the hands of human beings, the more likely it is that a crazed gambler will do harm to an official who cost him his life savings.

Is the suggestion that someone might act on that anger and carry out a terrible retaliatory act really so crazy?

“I don’t think you’re crazy at all,” said Crawford, whose brother Jerry and father, Shag, were longtime major-league umpires. “As the ref, you understand that at the end of games, something may happen and security may come into your room to talk about something. It could be that there’s a maniac who’s sitting in the basement of his mother and father’s house.

“My brother and I talk about it a lot. Has gambling added another piece to it? Yes. As the official, though, it’s just another part of it. We’re not getting rid of gambling. It’s just another facet of pro officiating. You have to be able to deal with it and go to the next game.”

That’s fine as far as it goes. But everyone will be better off if the officials don’t have as much to deal with. You want to wait for the next Angel Hernandez to walk away? Sorry. The stakes have gotten too high.

____

©2024 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Visit inquirer.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.