It was a gorgeous day in Seattle.
I don’t mean that it was a gorgeous day FOR Seattle. It was just a nice day for anywhere. Okay, maybe natives of Phoenix might have found it a bit chilly, but the sun was out and the temperature was in the high 60’s. It was certainly the sunniest and warmest day I’ve been scheduled to work a baseball game.
It was a great day to be on the diamond.
The early innings went by without any really close plays or incidents. The red team’s pitcher struggled to get guys out the first two innings, allowing quite a few base runners and a few runs, but it wasn’t out of control. He managed to settle in pretty nicely for innings three and four.
The pitcher for the green team was fairly steady for most of his five innings and had a pretty nice mound presence, I thought.
The red team was running from the get-go. Their lead-off hitter walked to begin the game and pretty quickly made a move to second. Despite a good throw, he swiped the bag. I thought it was a good sign for them.
The green catcher cashed in on his next two nice throws to second.
In reference to the title of this entry, the second guy cut down at second looked at me as he vacated the base and said, “He didn’t even tag me.”
Here’s what gets me. He KNEW he got tagged because it was obvious he was tagged. It wasn’t even a swipe-tag situation. The throw beat him and the fielder, with both hands on the ball, made a textbook tag, albeit a little high on his body, as opposed to on the legs.
He was LYING to me, right to my face! I mean, he could have said something about the tag being high and that his feet hit the bag before the tag and maybe given me a glimmer of doubt (which it wouldn’t have really…it wasn’t that close), but he just flat went for the ‘no tag’ story.
I was so stunned that all I could offer was a bit of a terse, “Oh, he tagged you.”
Not creative, but it got the point across.
Then, the red team, collectively from the dugout, were continually calling for balks on the green pitcher and calling him a ‘twitcher.’
I actually thought this was pretty funny as they clearly couldn’t have imagined I’d just start balking the kid due to the power of suggestion. As I said prior, the green pitcher looked really comfortable on the mound and had a really clean motion from the stretch.
In other words, I saw no such twitches.
Well, I thought I saw the red pitcher twitch at one point, but I wasn’t convinced I had a balk. Upon further thought, I probably should have/could have gotten him.
Our big episode of the night came with the bases loaded and two out in the bottom of the sixth with green at the plate trying to extend their five-run lead. The red pitcher had just walked in a run. The first pitch to the new batter was a bit high and tight. The batter began his motion to swing and then didn’t make much of an effort as the ball hit something and went down to the ground and then the backstop. The batter immediately dropped his bat and started trotting to first as his teammates on the bases started to advance.
There was a bit of grumbling from the red team, including the two middle infielders, both of whom said something about it hitting his hands and the “hands are part of the bat.”
In case you don’t know, that is a giant myth. There is nothing in any rule book that says the hands are part of the bat. I don’t know how it became such a commonly-held believe among baseball people.
Anyhow, I turned to the fielders and said that it must have hit his hands or forearms as my partner had not called for a foul ball, all the while thinking that it did sound as if it might have hit the end of the bat, even if also glancing off his hands thereafter.
When I turned by attention back toward home plate, my partner was making his way toward the infield and gesturing for me to come in.
“Okay, the ball hit off the end of the bat, so what do we have here,” he asked.
At this point, I was just glad he wasn’t going to ask me what I saw because I honestly couldn’t have sworn one way or the other, based on what I ’saw,’ what the correct ruling was, but my immediate reaction was that it was not a hit-by-pitch, rather, that we had a foul ball. Heck, I wasn’t even too pleased with how little effort the batter made to not get hit by the pitch.
“Well, if the ball went off the bat, it’s just a foul ball and everyone needs to get back to where they were and it’s oh-and-one,” was my brief response.
“Okay.”
So, I turned around and ordered the runners back to their original bases.
Of course, the green coach wanted to go have a chat with my partner. It sounded like it didn’t go too well from where I was standing, but my partner was firm in telling him that he was ruling it a foul ball and that was the end of it.
What I wouldn’t have expected was for the red team to score four runs in the top of the seventh and to have the tying run at second with two out, making that run that didn’t score on that play seem a WHOLE lot bigger than it did when green was up five.
The kid who pitched the last two innings for green wasn’t nearly as in-control as his predecessor and wasn’t getting much help from his defense who booted a few balls around the field.
Ultimately, with first and second occupied and a two-two count, he got one by the batter and ended the game much to the relief of everyone.
I believe we got the call right, which is what is important anyhow, and is also what I told my partner as we came together on our way to our vehicles.
“Nobody’s too happy with me right now.”
I figured that if anyone really thought they came up on the short end of a big call, it was green and, in the light of a victory, especially one snatched from the jaws of defeat, such things evaporate into the ether.
“Eh. Green got the win and red didn’t really have anything to contest. I think everything is fine, man.”
Like I said, it was a great day to be on the diamond.
