Craig Calcaterra passes along a conspiracy theory from The Common Man:

To The Common Man, it suggests that perhaps TBS was asked not to make a big deal out of potentially missed calls. This would seem to jive with an earlier play in the San Francisco-Atlanta series, where Buster Posey was clearly out at 2B, but announcers refused to acknowledge it, in spite of the video evidence to the contrary (and Posey saying after the game “it’s a good thing we don’t have instant replay).

If this is the case, it seems likely that the commissioner’s office has made conscious decision not just to ignore the loud cries for expanded instant replay, but to tacitly suppress them by denying these voices additional evidence with which to make their case.

Calcaterra adds:

I thought the Posey thing was totally bizarre, and was made even more bizarre when Mat Winer, the studio host, said he thought Posey was safe and was basically laughed off the stage by David Wells, Cal Ripken and Dennis Eckersley.  Winer would be beholden to a TBS/MLB mandate in ways that Eck, Ripken and Boomer really wouldn’t be.

So is there a conspiracy at play here? Did Major League Baseball ask TBS announcers to downplay discussions of bad umpiring?

I’m going to go ahead and say no.

Now perhaps I’m biased, since I’m occasionally the subject of similar conspiracy theories myself. And you must allow the small possibility that, as a representative of a team-owned network, I am part of the machine and have been assigned by Bud Selig to quash these rumors before they gain too much steam.

But that’s not actually the case, and I’m guessing neither Selig nor anyone in his office told anyone at TBS anything about what to say in the broadcast. I’d go with Occam’s Razor, like Calcaterra suggests.

If anything, I’d guess their producer told them that harping too much on a few bad calls diminishes the drama inherent in the actual sport part of the sport, which the announcers have to play up — not so much to benefit the league office as to keep people watching the damn broadcast.

Plus, the game’s moving forward; TBS has to show the next pitch, the broadcasters have to focus on what’s happening in front of them and all the folks in the production truck have jobs to do that might preclude them from replaying the same bad call ad infinitum.

Also, really fleshing this conspiracy theory out, I’m not sure it even benefits Major League Baseball to protect its umpires this October. If there are really going to be discussions about how to better umpiring and incorporate instant replay this winter, why enact some nefarious scheme that only works to the advantage of the umpire’s union?

Certainly it protects the product on the field, but Major League Baseball must realize that it has a monopoly on professional baseball, and it’s going to take a hell of a lot of bad umpiring before people start tuning out.

So I’m sticking with no. But of course, they could be paying me to write that.