Hindsight Is Apparently Better Than 20/20

During the World Series Game 2, when the White Sox' Jermaine Dye was the beneficiary of a phantom hit-by-pitch, only clearly seen on an extremely zoomed-in replay (even normal replay was hard to tell), which led to the grand slam by Paul Konerko and a 6-4 lead, and Fox announcers Joe Buck and Tim McCarver started branding the home-plate umpire repeatedly, like an abusive pair of husbands, for another blown call, I told Mike that I was going to go on a profanity-laced tirade against these two.

That's what I felt at the time, and believe me, all sorts of poisonous invective is flowing through my veins at the piling on of Buck and McCarver. Everyone in the ballpark, except perhaps for Jermaine Dye, thought he got hit by the pitch. Buck thought he got hit by the pitch. It sounded like he got hit by the pitch. When they replayed it from every conceivable angle and with slow motion, it was impossible to tell differently. In the NFL, this would have been ruled "insufficient evidence." But when Fox finally went to the electronically-enhanced zoom-in, suddenly it was the worst call ever. The Astros certainly would have won the game, it was implied, if that call wasn't made. And here comes old replay of Game 2 of the ALCS and the Pierzynski strike-out-safe-at-first controversy. Woe is the Astros. Jermaine Dye had no chance with that 3-2 count of doing anything but making an out.

That's how every announcer treats a blown call. That if the blown call wasn't made then the other team would definitely not have won without it. We are completely 100% certain that Dye makes an out if the correct call of "foul ball" is made. If you're the Astros, it's still 4-2 and you have the lead. The bases are loaded and you have 2 out. You still have to make pitches. Do the Astros get any blame for not making the right pitches? No--Konerko would have hit the grand slam if the pitches were the most perfect combination of deception and location and calculated for success by Stephen Hawking.

And that pitch--Mike noted to me that at the very least, the pitch was out of the strike zone and there was no intent by Dye to swing at it. In my limited career as a little league pitcher, I got the benefit of those kinds of foul balls--balls that nearly hit the head of the other batter and hit their bat. I was grateful for those calls, but inside of me, I felt like it was cheating. I didn't throw a strike. The batter didn't swing.

In the grand scope of things, the Dye play should have been a walk anyway.

Then on the radio coming home, the guys on ESPN radio started talking about the CLEARLY blown call, as if from their vantage point, watching television, they knew better than the umpire and the millions of people watching. Who in the world could have seen that hit the bat? Later, replays showed the "logic" of the call. "See, the ball travels down after hitting the bat. If it had hit his hands, it would have gone this way." In normal speed, do you think anyone was checking that logical trajectory?

Can you imagine the umpire explaining to Ozzie Guillen, "Well, you see Ozzie, using the simple X/Y coordinates here I have on sample graph A, where the line represents the direction of the ball, you notice a down slope? Under the given circumstances, a ball traveling 94 miles per hour and hitting a player in the hand would have caused this direction, sample graph B." Ozzie would have responded, "Puta de madre!"

And now we come back to Joe Buck. I'm sure he's been told this, or overheard this, and I'm sure he's even accidentally glanced at this a few times in newspapers: He's not his father. I cannot fathom Jack Buck making that big of a deal about this call. Instead of going full bore on how wrong the umpire was, a classic announcer like the elder Buck would have likely spoken about the reasons for the bad call. From a purely journalistic standpoint, Joe Buck and McCarver violated a rule that has become a sort of sissy nerd in the media world: observing and considering all sides of the story, and not making an ultimate comment about the matter, where you plainly display your disgust or your ratings-hungry zeal for pointing out the mistake. Buck and McCarver make it sound like the umpire wants to make the wrong call. As if he is begging to hear for the rest of his life, "I gave you the chance to be an ump, and you blew iiiiit!" (Thank you, Copland)

Ultimate point: Don't you think if the umpire had seen it clearly, he would have gotten it right? Don't you at least give him that?

Jack Buck would have likely said, "Well, guys, we have million-dollar video equipment, and only after we saw it in slow-motion replay several times, and only then with that crazy zoom thing, we finally figured out what happened...and even then it was hard to tell. But those are the breaks, folks. I can't believe, what I just saw!" (Thank you, Kirk Gibson, 1988 World Series)