I was watching the game tonight when the left field umpire made the (absolutely correct) infield fly rule call in the 8th inning. Before you start imitating those degenerate hillbillies and start throwing virtual beer cans at me, let's take a look at the rule (emphasis mine).
"On the infield fly rule the umpire is to rule whether the ball could ordinarily have been handled by an infielder, not by some arbitrary limitation such as the grass, or the base lines. The umpire must rule also that a ball is an infield fly, even if handled by an outfielder, if, in the umpire's judgment, the ball could have been as easily handled by an infielder."Simply take the rule for what it says. Could the ball have been handled by the shortstop, as easily as it could have been handled by the left fielder? Yep, and you're lying to yourself if you say otherwise. The word is "could," not "was." He was camped under the ball, not backpedaling, with his hand raised to signal that he was calling off the outfielder. If you're an umpire observing this situation, the only logical conclusion to draw is that the ball could "ordinarily" be handled by the infielder. So you must make the call. It's right there in the rule. The umpire doesn't have a crystal ball telling him that the shortstop will misjudge the ball by about ten feet and then bail out at the last second. For the bulk of that baseball's flight, everybody watching that game would have agreed that the ball could be handled by the shortstop - "ordinarily."
Where the umpire erred was in his delayed signal. I have no idea when he yelled, as they always do, "Infield fly, batter's out!" The call is usually a boring formality, handled in such a way that the verbal call goes out and then the hand is raised. All we can see on the video is the hand being raised, but logic would dictate that there was some sort of call made at least a second or so before the hand went up.
That being said, the call and the signal should have been given sooner. The point of the rule is to protect the runners from getting erased by shady double plays. As soon as the rule is invoked and the batter is called out, the runners no longer have to decide what to do on the bases. They can simply stay put, without any risk of being forced at the next base. Or they can run, at their own risk, and let the chips fall where they may. The umpire was clearly trying to make sure that the shortstop was under the ball before he gave the signal, but there would have been no controversy at all if he had made the call sooner. Drunken rednecks in Atlanta still would have bitched about the call, but there would have been no legitimate controversy.
None of this excuses what happened at Turner Field tonight. The correct call was made, less quickly than it should have been made, but it was correct in any event. Then those losers at the stadium delayed the game by fifteen minutes while they threw their assorted garbage on the field.
As tends to happen on this blog, we're now going to get to the point of this post, several hundred words after I began typing it. Judging from the reaction that you saw on television tonight, you might be tempted to think that these people in Atlanta are die-hard baseball fans. They're not. That's what I'm here to tell you. Your first clue should have been that they don't understand the infield fly rule. From what I've seen tonight though, most people don't understand the infield fly rule. So I guess I don't get to use that on my 'baseball fan' qualifying exam.
I'll instead do what I like to do on this blog, when I'm not making smartassed remarks about the president or engaging in wishful thinking about Notre Dame. I'm going to tell you a story.
(I'm presently enrolled in an online composition course at Arizona State. The teachers don't ever let me wander around and explore the shit that pops into my head before I say what needs to be said. They want every part of a given paper to relate to the assignment. Unfortunately for you, this blog is not graded for credit. So you'll just have to wait until I'm good and ready to get to the point. I think I'm ready now.)
I was wrapping up a hell of a bender in Detroit with a buddy one night when we heard that Pete Rose was going to be allowed to be honored in Atlanta before a World Series game. There was one of those 'greatest of all time' teams being unveiled, or something like that. It was the first time that Pete Rose was allowed to be associated with Major League Baseball, following his lifetime ban. My drinking buddy at the time was a huge Pete Rose fan, so we decided that we would get tickets and fly to Atlanta for the game. World Series tickets would be tough to get though, so we were prepared to pay a heavy price.
There was one thing to try before we resorted to using a scalper though. When I shook off my hangover the next morning, I logged on to ticketmaster.com. This was quite a few years ago, mind you, so things on the internet weren't entirely the same as they are now. (It was '99, I think. I might be off by a year or two.) Anyhow, there had been an announcement that something like 3,000 seats would be released on Ticketmaster that day, so I expected the servers to be tied up. The present system puts you into a virtual waiting room until your spot in line comes up, then you tie into the server and see what's available. Back then it was the Wild West. If you got in before the whole thing crashed, good for you. Otherwise, sorry about your luck.
For a busy event, the Ticketmaster system usually crashed within five or ten minutes of tickets going on sale. The tickets had been on sale for an hour or so by the time I got up, so I expected to find that the system was down or that the tickets were all gone. Nope. There were no delays as I logged in to the site. I requested four tickets. I got four tickets. Beauty.
The drinking buddy from the night before was going with me, obviously. Another guy that we knew decided that he would buy a plane ticket and join us as well. (I flew for free back then, since my kind and loving wife was a flight attendant. The other two fellas had to buy plane tickets.) Anyhow, the three of us went to Atlanta and we had one extra seat to spare.
We went to a bar near the stadium for some pre-game festivities. The bar was pretty crowded, but we got a table. We sat and talked with Braves "fans" and Yankees fans for quite a while. Nobody wanted our extra ticket, even though we were offering it for free. We wound up leaving it at the bar for anyone who cared to take it. I assume that someone eventually grabbed it. I don't know. We never sat in our seats at the game, since we were perfectly content to wander around the stadium and make frequent stops at the beer concessions.
The Braves were pretty good back then, as you probably gathered from the fact that they were in the World Series. I used to see their playoff games on television. Thousands of fans doing their little war chant and tomahawk chop - the atmosphere seemed electric. It wasn't. The whole thing was fake. When the PA system played the war chant, the fans would do their little chopping motion. When the music stopped, the fans stopped. It was cheesy, uninspiring, and lame. And there were a lot of empty seats. At key points in the game, when the fans should have been going apeshit, the place was dead.
This whole experience threw my buddies and me for quite a loop. As you may or may not recall, the Tigers were awful at the time. The crowds at Tiger Stadium weren't very large, to say the least, but at least the fans at the games gave a shit about baseball. When a mediocre hitter managed to slap one through the right side with a runner in motion, putting men at first and third with one out, the place went nuts. In Atlanta - during a World Series game - there was no such dynamic. The baseball fans there really sucked - seriously.
One of my friends was pretty drunk by the time the game really got going. He and I had purchased a pair of caps with that little sissy 'A' logo on them and started rooting for the Braves right at the start of the game. Why? 'Cause screw the Yankees. That's why. We were Braves fans that night, so we wanted the Braves to win. Whenever he would start shouting loudly and trying to get the crowd fired up, other people would start yelling... at him... telling him to sit down and shut up. I'm not kidding.
As the years have gone by since that time, we've all seen reports about the fact that the Braves have won all kinds of division titles and such, but they still don't sell out their stadium for playoff games. (Tonight's game was not a sellout, incidentally.) And then, when one controversial (but correct) call is made, that bunch of bums is going to spend fifteen minutes throwing shit on the field?
Give me a break. Where was the outrage when the Braves made 3 errors tonight? How about the 12 men that they left on base? Going 1-for-8 with men in scoring position? How about the swing and miss that didn't count before Ross hit that homerun? No, no, no. Those things don't explain why the Braves are done for the season. It was an umpire making a judgment call on a play that the Cardinals shortstop wound up botching. That's why the Braves lost. These people are pathetic.
Cliff's Notes version of this post - Braves fans, to the extent that there actually are Braves fans, are a bunch of losers.
