Oh take a pill. And wipe your glasses. I was watching the game with two Cub fans, haters of all things White Sox, and they managed to see both the dirt and the change of direction.
Clean the hate and invectives from your eyes and you’d see it too.
I’ve seen close up video of the ball going into the guy’s glove. There’s no way the ball changed directions or kicked up dirt. Where the fuck do you people come up with this nonsense? By 10 AM EST the ball will have rolled to the backstop.
The video is here: http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp
That thing the ball hits is his glove.
There’s no hate, just annoyance at a bad call and the bullshit and blather defending it.
Ah, I see it now. The ball bounces off a WMD in front of the catcher’s mitt.
Get a bigger TV. You watching that on your new I-Pod?
If you think it’s a bad call, then think that. And you know what? bad calls happen, people make decisions, and in baseball they aren’t reversed.
It’s a lot like life. Move on.
Point conceded.
I posted this thread literally two minutes after it happened. You know what: fans bitch, and in sports they sometimes bitch for decades. It’s a like life. Move on.
So THAT’S where Saddam hid the damned things.
I’d like to weigh in…
The catch was clean. Watch it on HD & you’ll see it without a doubt.
The call was bad. The signaling of the call was bad. Umps will let it be known that there was no catch. Since the ball was in the glove, it would have been a simple matter of tagging out the runner or throwing to first if the catcher was not led to believe that the batter was already out. Which he was.
I can live with a blown call…it’s the screwed up signaling of the call that bugs me about this. It absolutley ruined what was a great game to watch. If the Sox come back and win it all, this call (like Brady’s “Tuck”) will be re-lived for years to come.
They should have gone to the 3B umpire sooner if there was an appeal.
Looking at the zoomed slo-mo replay from last night, it looked to me like it bounced. Whether it did or not, though, I blame the Angels’ catcher for not just tagging the runner to make sure.
Ump did blow the call with that double signal, though. I was watching the Cards game, so I don’t know if that was a common thing all night, but it looked to me like he called Pierzynski out.
A slight hijack question here -
I just gotta ask. Do the field umpires provide any clues to the plate umpire about the status of the catch?
It seems to me the plate umpire may have his view of a low catch blocked by the catcher’s body and possibly there is a signal (or lack of signal) from the field umps that would indicate to the plate ump that “no catch” occured. Kind of like the appeal to the base umpire for a ruling on whether a hitter “came around” on a pitch.
To repeat what others have noted - Scioscia handled this much better than the rest of us. Truly professional.
But they was robbed! 
We can debate it all day, or all year.
I did watch it on HD. Right after it happened, Fox showed a magnified slo-mo that clearly showed the ball changing directions and going UP into the catcher’s mitt.
A smart catcher, regardless of what the ump signals, when he catches strike three anywhere near the ground is going to tag the batter right away just to make sure.
More than the umps are at fault for the Angels crying in their Cheerios this morning, they should look in the mirror too. But, yeah, the 3rd base ump should have been consulted right away. Another screw up by a catcher (Sciosca).
That was where I saw it as well, on the magnified replay. I wish I had Tivo’d it.
I saw that, too, and it simply looked like the ball settling in the catcher’s glove. Like I said, I don’t see any dirt.
And my die-hard Sox fans (and I mean, these are the guys who were out in the street cheering and banging pots and pans yelling “Cubs suck” when they blew Games 6 & 7 of the NLCS…God, I love 'em) say that it was a clean catch, and Pierzinski should have been out. So I’d say your Cub-fan friends need a pair of glasses if they saw dirt.
But, anyhow…once again, the point is more that the ump wasn’t clear on his call. Every case of no catch, he clearly called out “no catch,” (so far as I know), and did not do both the strike-out-point-to-first and the fist pump.
It was a bad call. Shit happens. I’ll chime in with the “bad umpiring” crowd, though. He clearly made an out call after the third strike motion.
He never made an out call. He consistently made the exact same pointing motion followed by a fist pump for every strike throughout the game. The fact that he didn’t follow the strike call with an out call is what tipped off Pierszynski (himself a catcher who had been observing this ump close up all night and who was attuned to his mechanics) that the play was still alive.
I think it was a blown call but that it was close enough to be forgivable, especially if Paul’s mitt knocked up some dust as he made the catch.
I think that Paul deserves some blame for running off the field without waiting for the out call and without tagging Piezynski just to be sure. I also think that AJ deserves some credit for being heads up enough to realize he hadn’t been called out and running to first.
For the record, I am a Twins fan who hates the Chisox.
I’m a diehard Sox fan and I’ll admit it was probably a bad call. I did see the “change of direction” on the super slow-mo magnification, but it could have been bouncing off the mitt. I didn’t see any dirt fly up, but I wasn’t really looking for it. The call itself was probably blown, and the signal from the umpire was certainly misleading if not completely blown also.
What I do think is interesting, is that Pierszynski immediately sensed something different about the way the umpire called him out. He’d been behind the plate all game, and something about the way Eddings called the strike was different enough to make him think he should run down to first. Had Josh Paul been catching the whole game, I think he would have tagged him or thrown to first.
I take it you didn’t watch Scioscia’s interview after the game. He said that regardless of that one call, they shouldn’t have been in a position to depend on that out, and they didn’t win because they didn’t deserve to. He still disagreed with the call, but went on to say they didn’t play as hard as they should have. I can’t find the full interview, does anyone by chance have a link?
You’ll always know the assholes by how glib and condescending they are when other people get screwed. The bitching I’ve seen is from fans, not from the players, and a lot of fans don’t care about the Angels, they just think it sucks that a great game was won on a terrible call.