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Baseball's biggest blown call keeps happening
MLB Playoff Central
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Yankees win 4-2 |
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But he's still fine with a team losing on any other kind of blown call.
That's right, Cardinals fans, 24 years worth of advances in high-definition replay after Todd Worrell's foot beat Jorge Orta's to the bag and Selig would still rather have the wrong team win the World Series than expand the use of replay.
"I'm quite satisfied the way things are," the Commish told FOXSports.com. "We need to do a little work, clean up some things. But do I think we need more replay? No. Baseball is not the kind of game that can have interminable delays."
Uh, yes it is. It's precisely that kind of game. The whole sport is sort of an interminable delay interrupted by spasms of thrilling action.
Never mind that every angle of a call can be played back before the next batter has even set foot in the batter's box. A fifth ump in the booth could easily watch the play in super slo-mo, render a verdict and buzz it down to the field.
Perhaps part of Selig's concern is the constant, almost comical correction of missed calls that widespread use of replay would dictate. Because no matter how many times you hear an MLB or umpire union shill talk about how often the blues get the calls the right, the fact is they miss bang-bang plays at an alarming rate, as evinced by this postseason.
The umps didn't even wait for the actual playoffs to begin to start ruining the playoffs with their missed calls. In the Twins-Tigers thrilling one-game playoff to determine the AL Central winner, Detroit got jobbed when home plate ump Randy Marsh missed a pitch hitting Brandon Inge's jersey, which would have forced in the go-ahead run in the top of the 12th.
Is it nearly impossible for the human eye, shrouded by a mask and perched behind a catcher, to determine if a tailing 90-plus fastball grazed a billowing piece of fabric? Absolutely.
But guess who had no trouble figuring out that Inge should have been awarded first base? Every single viewer watching the very first replay of the pitch. It took all of about eight seconds to learn -- beyond a shadow of a doubt -- that Marsh had missed it.
Marsh, who you may remember missed Alex Rodriguez's karate chop on Bronson Arroyo when he was umping first base in Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS and had to be bailed out by plate ump Joe West, further upset Tigers skipper Jim Leyland when he suggested that replays were inconclusive.
"I can understand how the ump didn't see the pitch hit him," Leyland offered graciously. "But to say the video was inconclusive upsets me, because everybody in America saw that it did."
A missed call, easily reversed by replay, had torpedoed the Tigers' 163-game season. (Though the Tigers' spot on the sidelines for the '09 playoffs was richly deserved as they choked down the stretch and were reeled in by the Justin Morneau-less Twins.)
But that missed call was just preamble to the Declaration of Incompetence that the umpires have so enthusiastically ratified this October.
Nobody makes the case for replay as strongly as the umps themselves, and Ron Kulpa got started making that case in the top of the second of Game 1 between the Phillies and Rockies.
Yorvit Torrealba, who had doubled, tagged up at second when Clint Barmes hit a medium-deep fly ball to rightfielder Jason Werth. It looked like Torrealba would advance easily, but Werth uncorked a strong throw. It didn't matter that the throw wasn't in time to actually allow third baseman Pedro Feliz to record an out, it just had to be there in time to make the play close enough for Kulpa to miss it.
Which, of course, is exactly what happened.
Torrealba's foot hit the bag as Feliz collected the throw. As more and more of Torrealba's sliding body accumulated on the bag, Feliz belatedly tagged him high up on the chest.
Out.
Torrealba was stunned. The announcers were circumspect. The replays were conclusive.
Kulpa had blown it. Umpires call third base "the rocking chair" because there are so few calls made there that it's an easy day at the office, but Kulpa had managed to butcher his first chance. (Kulpa wasn't done killing the Rockies in this series. More on that later.)
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| Jim Tracy argues the call with Jerry Meals after Cliff Lee was ruled safe on a pickoff throw. (Chris McGrath / Getty Images) |
After going an entire inning without blowing a call, the umps were back at it in the bottom of the third. After singling and stealing second, Philly pitcher Cliff Lee -- perhaps emboldened by his swipe of second -- wandered into no-man's land and was picked off by Ubaldo Jimenez and Troy Tulowitzki. The pickoff was perfect, save for the part where second base ump Jerry Meals called Lee safe.
To everyone else's naked eye, Lee looked out by a wide margin, a view upheld by replay. Meals may have been the only guy in the yard who had Lee safe. (Meals, too, would have a controversial return engagement later in the series.)
The postseason was just beginning and the blues were just getting warmed up.
In Game 1 of the Angels-Red Sox series, CB Bucknor -- voted the worst ump in baseball in a 2006 players' survey -- missed two calls at first base against the Red Sox.
When asked about the calls, Boston veteran third baseman Mike Lowell simply said, "I'll defer to the replays."
Ah, yes, isn't it pretty to think so. Oh, that we could all defer to the replays and actually get the calls right. But then we'd lose the human element of having baseball's worst umpire deciding the outcome of playoff games.
Not to be outdone, later in the same game, third base umpire Greg Gibson gacked a call against the Angels, calling Torii Hunter out on the back end of a bizarre 5-2-5 double play when both the naked eye and high-def replay had Hunter safe.
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| How could Phil Cuzzi have missed seeing that the ball Joe Mauer hit was fair and should have been a ground-rule double? (Jared Wickerham / Getty Images) |
And then there's Phil Cuzzi.
Manning the left-field line in Game 2 of the Yankees-Twins series, Cuzzi managed to miss Joe Mauer's fly ball landing fair by almost a foot despite being right on top of the play.
You didn't need high definition to suss this one out. Abraham Zapruder's grainy 8mm would have more than sufficed. As would 20-80 vision. But Cuzzi whiffed on a call that couldn't even be considered particularly difficult.
The day after the call had contributed to the Twins' extra-inning loss (though not as mightily as bat-shy firestarter Joe Nathan), Mauer was diplomatic.
"Why dwell on something you can't do anything about?'' he said, taking the line Selig surely wishes all his charges would adopt.
But Joe, we can do something. We can watch a replay and get the call right.
Twins manager Ron Gardenhire seemed to understand that when he said, "I would have had to call my coaches up in the booth. Give me a headset and give me a flag, we can fix this stuff.''
But he quickly backtracked, remembering baseball's long tradition of blown calls, euphemistically referred to as "the human element."
"The great thing about baseball is the human element, and we always want to keep it that way," Gardenhire said. "I think if you saw the last game against Detroit, the ball looked like it might have hit Brandon [Inge's] jersey. That was a run. The game could have went that way, so breaks are part of it and they went against us this time."
Yeah, why use replay when you can just wait for the next awful call to even things out?
Unless, of course, all the calls go against you.
The Rockies must be wondering what they ever did to Jerry Meals and Ron Kulpa.
With Colorado and Philadelphia tied 5-5 in the top of the ninth of their pivotal Game 3, Jimmy Rollins on second and one out, Chase Utley appeared to foul a ball off himself in the batter's box.
When he began running to first I figured my eyes and my 46-inch HD TV must have tricked me.
As it turned out, it was Utley's action that tricked the umps. Replays revealed the ball had clearly hit him in the leg before rolling fair, but home plate ump Meals missed it.
Huston Street pounced on the ball near the first-base line and threw the ball over Utley's head to first baseman Todd Helton who made an acrobatic catch-and-toe-drag as he crossed the base.
Kulpa called Utley safe, bringing an argument from Helton and Rockies manager Jim Tracy. Replays supported Helton and Tracy's dissent.
So after missing calls at third and second in Game 1, Meals and Kulpa completed their cycle with missed calls at home and first in Game 3. All against the Rockies.
Meals admitted his mistake.
"Yeah, the ball came up and grazed off his leg and continued rolling up the line," Meals said. "No. 1, it wasn't seen by myself or anybody. If you look at it, you'll be able to see it."
What do you mean, "if you look at it"? Oh, right, you mean, if you look at it on replay. If only we had that futuristic technology.
So not only did Meals admit he blew the call, he as much as said that the only way to get the call right would be to "look at it."
Meals's mea culpa must be cold comfort for the Rockies as they look forward to 2010 spring training.
No mea culpa from Mr. Kulpa.
And not only was there no "our bad" from Selig, he thinks things are fine the way they are. Just another missed call by Major League Baseball this October.
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