The Morning Roundup: When 28 outs isn’t enough
There was plenty going on in the sports world on Wednesday, from Serena Williams losing in the French Open, to Ken Griffey, Jr., calling it quits, to the Flyers winning Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Finals in overtime.
But the one thing everyone will be talking about in the days and weeks to come is Armando Galarraga. Or worse yet, Jim Joyce.
The scene: Two outs in the bottom of the ninth in a game where the Tigers lead the Indians 3-0. All Galarraga, a 28-year-old pitcher from Venezuela, had to do was get one more out to complete the 21st perfect game in MLB history, and the third this season.
Cleveland’s Jason Donald hit a ground ball that Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera fielded well away from the bag. He threw to Galarraga covering first and, as every replay of the play shows, Galarraga beat Duncan to the base.
But Joyce called him safe.
Good-bye perfection.
After the game, Joyce watched the replay and admitted his mistake. Not a lot of umpires – or people, for that matter – would do such a thing, but it sounds like Joyce is that type of guy.
Without a doubt, we’ll hear a lot in the following days about instant replay in baseball and the quality of umpires in this era.
But what Major League Baseball should not do is perhaps the most obvious, and sentimental, move it could make: overrule the call and award Galarraga the perfect game. There are already those who feel it should happen, but it really shouldn’t.
Of the 20 perfect games, 11 happened prior to 1986 – the year the NFL first adopted instant replay, which we will use as a reference point. That means if Joyce’s call happened in one of those first 11 games, we would never even know it was wrong because the technology wasn’t there.
But now it is available, and if Joyce had been allowed to use the replay during the game that would be one thing; but to use it after the fact is not right. By not using instant replay in the game, MLB runs the risk of human error on every single call. That’s what this was, human error, and as egregious as it is, it’s part of the game.
And what if the play had happened in the first inning? Maybe there would be some angst, but definitely not the outrage there was on Wednesday night.
Two other things I’d like to point out that have nothing to do with the call:
- Why was Cabrera fielding that ball? If you watch the replay, the ball was practically hit to the second baseman. If Cabrera had correctly fielded his position, Detroit second baseman Carlos Guilen fields the ball and likely gets Duncan without incident.
- Galarraga had just three strikeouts, but threw 66 of his 87 pitches for strikes. Think about that for a moment. The strikeouts accounted for nine of his 66 strikes; 24 of them were strikes that were hit for outs and one was the ball Duncan hit that should have been an out. That means that he threw 53 pitches that weren’t put into play. All that while Daisuke Matsuzaka was throwing 109 pitches in 6 2/3 innings.