Where have all the good umpires gone, anyway? Seriously, the quality of the umpiring in this postseason has been awful.
I don’t think either LCS has two good umpires on its crew. Today’s NLCS Game 4 proved that. Houston’s pitchers were getting strikes in the on deck circle, while Jeff Suppan and Jason Marquis couldn’t have thrown batting practice fastballs and gotten them called for strikes.
And to the schmuck behind home plate: YOU DON’T THROW A PLAYER OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF AN AT-BAT IN THE 8TH INNING OF A 1-RUN PLAYOFF GAME. You nod your head and ignore him until he steps back in. And that pitch wasn’t even a strike anyway! Unless the collarbone has become the new upper limit of the strike zone, it was ball 4.
That, combined with a missed call yesterday (Chris Burke got picked off at 1st by Pujols. Everyone saw it,) and the ALCS crap calls makes me long for the days of Don Denkinger and Eric Gregg.
It almost makes me wish Angel Hernandez were on the NLCS crew. At least I know to expect a screwjob from him. I guess Greg Gibson will have to do.
I’m not saying it does give anyone a blank check. But when even the Fox analysts and studio crew say Edmonds should have gone after him for it, I think it’s justified. That pitch was high and inside, it was a ball when they threw it to Berkman earlier in the game and the umpire shouldn’t be changing the outcome of the game in the middle of an at-bat.
Cuzzi’s got a history of horrible umpiring, too, so it doesn’t really surprise me.
I have to say that nothing in Edmonds’ body language suggested that he was saying anything worthy of getting him tossed. I think the umpire was awfully thinned skinned after LaRussa (rightly) called him out and then proceeded to really make a scene for a good ten minutes or so.
Question: Was La Russa wise to confront the umpire like that? Not that he wasn’t justified, but was there any point to angrily going out to confront the ump, or was it counterproductive? La Russa (and Edmonds too) has been around baseball long enough to have a pretty good idea what would get him ejected. Was his outburst unprofessional, or was he doing what a good manager should do?
Umps never change a ball/strike decision, but a manager will confront them when he thinks the zone is inconsistent or they’re calling it wrong. LaRussa knew he’d get tossed, he’s been around these umps long enough to know the limits with each one of them.
Umps will take a lot of crap from a manager or player, even F-bombs all day long. The magic word is “you”. Fuck this, fuck that, motherfucker this or that all day long. Add the magic word and you get a thumb. My guess is Edmonds started in with something he shouldn’t have said and was shown the door.
From what I could see, it looked like Edmonds told Cuzzi “Fuck that” just before he was ejected. I hope Cuzzi was able to recover from hearing such a naughty word, especially from a baseball player, who would never say such a thing.
I’m pretty sure that managers occasionally get themselves thrown out of the game on purpose. Sometimes they do it because they’re so mad they don’t care; other times it’s to fire up their teams. I doubt La Russa made anything worse.
I would tend to disagree, up to a certain point. I’d say that the blown call DID affect the Angels to some degree, in that it cost them their mental edge. It certainly rattled Escobar enough that he served up that meatball to Crede, costing them Game 2. They started pressing in Game 3, wanting to prove something, and when they couldn’t get anything done, essentially fell apart (IMHO).
That call was the turning point of the series–IF (and that’s a BIG IF) the Angels managed to steal that game they would be going home 2-0. Instead, they lost, the Sox regained their swagger (talk about a pitching staff!), and the Angels will be watching the World Series on TV.
The better team won, no question. I just wish the Angels were a bit more mentally tough to make it a more competitive ALCS.
I think they just ran out of gas. The Yankees series was incredibly wearing, both physically and mentally. They had enough left to take game 1, but then just hit the wall. They also were without their number one starter.
I didn’t really care who won - I’m a Baltimore fan - as long as there was an AL team for me to root for in the Series.
The bracketed word is interesting. It presumes that the manager of a sports team does, indeed, have the right to march out and get in the umpire’s face.
It may be that i haven’t been in the the US long enough to get used to this practice, but i’ve always thought it was ridiculous. In games like rugby and cricket, the coaches/managers never set foot on the field, and the idea of standing toe to toe with an official and having a juvenile slanging match is completely foreign to those games.
Those sports have a method for dealing with poor officiating—the performance of the officials is reviewed by a group of experts, and if it’s found to be deficient, then they are replaced with someone who can do the job. Has an umpire ever, in the history of sport, been abused by a manager and then turned around and said, “You know what? You’re right! I think i’ll change the call”? The managers should stay off the fucking field and let the game go on.
Meh, had little to do with mental toughness. It had to do with a pitching rotation that was in shambles and a bullpen that had to be tired after all it was called on to do. Had to do with the Angels’ only offensive threat (Guerrero) not hitting and a batting philosophy that is utterly moronic (swing at anything you see, never take a walk). The Angels live by batting average and they die by batting average and it shows. If the hits don’t fall, they have nothing else they can do offensively.
mhendo, when I said LaRussa rightly went out to argue, I didn’t mean that he had the right to go out on the field and complain. What I meant was that he had a legitimate complaint about the inconsistent/biased strike zone. Whether or not he was right to make a scene about it is all a matter of personal taste.
And as far as the Angels are concerned, they didn’t have much of a prayer. Apparently, all of the Sox starers decided they wanted to start their bids for the HOF this series. Every starter except for Conteras threw a complete game in his start, and he even came back to throw one in game five after going into the ninth in game one.
Yeah, Guillen’s gonna have one hell of a rested bullpen for the Series. Maybe too rested. I’d think about having them throw some live pitching against the White Sox batters were I him.
I thought the NLCS strike zone was consistent for each team, just not from ump to ump in each game. The geometry was definately larger yesterday with called strikes on all four sides that would have been balls in Games 1 thru 3.
Edmonds’ high and inside 8th inning strike that he complained about was identical to one Berkman questioned and the low strikes were called against Ausmus, Lamb, Berke and others too.
Roy Oswalt wasn’t feeling much love from the ump in the 7th of Game 2 but these bad calls, if indeed they are that, should even out in who they impact over the course of a game. They’re rarely so egregious that you should get yourself kicked out of a game over them.
