Did you even see the play? The first baseman did not bobble the catch, or fail to get his foot on the bag. The first baseman ranged far to his right, fielded the grounder, and threw to the pitcher covering first. The pitcher caught the ball and stepped on first. The first baseman did not screw up, nor did the pitcher. The umpire (incorrectly) called the batter safe.
Beating out an infield grounder is an everyday, common happening. There is no need for an error to occur in order for a batter to gain a hit on an infield grounder.
Neither player, in any way, performed any action that was worthy of being charged an error, and so, given the umpire’s call of “safe”, the official scorer, to preserve his/her honesty and integrity, MUST call the play a hit.
If Joyce hadn’t blown the call it would have been the third perfect game within a month and the fourth in two years. What gives? Has something changed that makes perfect games more likely, or is this just a coincidence?
BTW, it’s not so easy to change the rules to allow replays on safe/out calls. The problem is that things can happen after the call that are hard to reverse. For example, suppose there’s a runner on second and the batter hits a fly ball to the outfield that is ruled to have been trapped (no catch). The runner from second goes to third base on the play without tagging up. There’s a protest, and the replay shows the fly ball was really caught, so the batter is out. What happens to the runner on third? Do you leave him on third? Put him back on second? Allow the defense to appeal?
Here’s another: runner on third base with two out. Batter hits a ground ball and is ruled out on a close play at first. The runner on third, who is slow, doesn’t cross the plate before the out call and heads to the dugout. There is a protest, and the replay shows the batter-runner was safe. What happens to the runner from third? Should he be allowed to come back and complete the play, scoring a run? Should he be sent back to third? Should he be declared out for abandoning the basepaths (even though he thought there were three out when it happened)?
As someone on Deadspin said, “Really the only question going forward is whether the new Instant Replay system will be called the ‘Joyce Rule’ or the ‘Galaraga Rule.’”
Everyone thought the runner was out. Including the runner. I’m not even a Tiger fan and I’m sick about this. That poor guy may never get another chance to throw a perfect game. Odds are against it. And he had one. And the ump blew it.
If I were Major League Baseball, I’d give it to him. Who would complain? The outcome doesn’t change. He got the next batter out. That’s the right thing to do.
There’s certainly a lot of luck involved, but I did see ESPN replaying some of the first perfect game, highlighting the strike calls. Let’s just say the strike zone was sized a little more like Prince Fielder than Dustin Pedroia. No, let’s be more clear: the strike zone started somewhere between the inside edge of the batter’s box and third base. I don’t know if there’s any structural explanation, or just an umpire who decided he was going to call things widely that day.
I think that Selig has the power to act “in the best interests of baseball” and set this right. He surely shouldn’t be reviewing every call, but in a situation like this, it would be best for Galaraga, Joyce, the Tigers, and all of baseball to have this one right.
I’m surprised at the lack of conspiracy theories. That is an amazingly poor call. It is hard to imagine how an experienced umpire could miss a call by such a huge margin. It wasn’t anywhere near a close call.
I can’t fathom how anyone can profess any kind of love for this game and still have an attitude of “you can’t change the call – it’s against the rules”. We live in a day and age where technology allows up to get things right – it takes a very special kind of density to think allowing errors in judgement are preferable to getting the call correct.
If it weren’t the last out of the game I could see argument about overruling the call… however, it was clearly the 27th out and the next batter was also out…
This should not only be overruled, but he should be celebrated for the only 28-out perfect game in MLB history.
If you were the batter, would you have told the ump you were out and asked him to reverse the call? I probably would have, but I’m not a major league player. Although the chances are slim, there was the opportunity for a comeback and at the professional level you really should be playing until your final out.
I’ve heard it said that as a perfect game progresses pretty much every player is thinking, “please don’t hit the ball to me” because they don’t want to be the ones to blow the perfect game with an error. I wonder if the umps feel that same kind of pressure.
I just looked at the video myself. I know umpires make mistakes, but I’ve been watching baseball since I was six and that is probably the worst call at first base I have ever seen. I saw Don Denkinger’s infamous call on TV in 1985 and that wasn’t even nearly as bad as this one. The play that Denkinger missed was by about a half of a step. Galaraga had the runner out by a clean two steps.
The irony is that I recently was able to watch the last out of Roy Halladay’s perfect game against the Marlins, and I was thinking, “Oh geez, I’m glad the umpire didn’t catch Ryan Howard pulling his foot off the bag just before the throw came in.” I figured, there was no way a first-base umpire would call the 27th batter safe on a play like that, where it was so obvious. No way. Guess I was wrong.
Because it’s meaningless. Tell me one thing MLB gets away with that isn’t exactly true of the NFL, NBA, NHL, and any other major sporting organization.
They get away with it because there’s nothing to get away with. What actionable issue are you oing to sue them over? Anything they do the NFL does, so why should baseball not be treated the same way? And the NFL et al. never got anti-trust exemptions.
Ethically, I don’t think it would be correct for a major league player to do this. Jason Donald has a fiduciary responsibility to perform his duties to the best of his ability, and his job is to win ball games for his team. Reversing a base hit (even if Joyce would have reversed his call) would be granting an advantage to the Tigers and away from his own team. I’m sure Donald feels bad for Galarraga but he has a duty to help the Indians win by any means possible within the rules of the sport. You don’t just give up a gift base hit.
A game with this particular set of circumstances comes along…well, quite literally once in a lifetime (more than a lifetime, actually…since no one alive today was born prior to the start of baseball’s “modern era”).
I generally agree with the conservative argument that you don’t mess with baseball and you don’t set new precedents that might come back to haunt you in the future. But at some point, you have to inject a dose of reality and ask what the odds are of this particular set of circumstances ever presenting itself again.
I don’t know if this is up to today’s exact date, but this site says that 391,990 major league baseball games have been played since 1876. Out of all of these, only one has seen something like we saw last night.
The closest thing in terms of impact was Don Denkinger’s bad call, which affected the outcome of the 1985 World Series. But put that into perspective. Plenty of baseball fans (myself included) couldn’t tell you the outcome of that series if asked point blank. But nearly any fan can tell you there have been 20 perfect games in Major League history.
Last night’s game should go down in the record books as the 21st. Bud Selig can make it so, and the world will continue spinning on its axis just as before. Trust me on this.
Feh. This is a call that everyone – the other team, the ump, every person with eyes – says was blown, and it’s not blown a little. It’s obviously blown. You can treat truly extraordinary situations in extraordinary ways without affecting the way you treat the rest of the game.