Quote:
Originally Posted by tarcone
Crazy ending in the Cards/Reds game.
Runner on 1st, 2 outs. 3-3 tie. Bottom 9th. Molina up. He rips on out to left. It bounces and hits above the wall on the wall of ads. Over the HR line. LFer plays it and Carpenter scores.
LFer doesnt put hands up. And plays the ball. Umps wait a second, then leave. Reds manager comes out of the dugout and looks for the U,ps after Cards have celebrated. No umps.
Clearly a ground rule 2B. But it stands. And the Cards win
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I'm split on this. For one, requiring managers to challenge plays "immediately" in game ending situations is a very tough standard when a) they get 30 seconds in all other situations and even that clock gets extended pretty liberally and b) in any game-ending situation, there's a lot of things going on, players celebrating and "immediate" can go very quickly. Not to mention that there's no particular reason why any walk-off situation couldn't just be centrally reviewed by MLB, but that's a whole different story.
I think Price also made a good point that 4 umpires on the field didn't have a good enough view to catch the mistake, but he and his coaches were expected to spot it from a sunken dugout into a corner they may have had no vantage point of. But that's why they have their own video reviewer and to miss the indication just because they couldn't hear the phone ring in a stadium celebrating a win is kind of bullshit.
Part of me wonders though if they either didn't know the ground rule or just forgot about it, and that's why they didn't think to challenge it. That's probably what happened with the LFer...but maybe the umps forgot as well and that's why they didn't call it initially.
I don't know. Just seems like there could be a better system. And maybe this will lead to managers challenging walk-offs automatically because there's no downside at all (YOU HEAR THAT TERRY COLLINS?! THERE'S NO DOWNSIDE AT ALL!) And when that happens and the umps time is wasted, maybe they change it.
But I'm just a Mets fan who was hoping the Cards would have lost last night (and they likely would have won even if the play was overturned).