A great brouhaha last night, one that will live on – partly, I think, because it was pivotal to the game, and because it encompassed two of the major ways in which the game has changed of late.
First, the facts, which divide into two topics:
1) The Slide.
The situation: the Dodgers, trailing 2-1 in the 7th, have runners at 1st & 3rd with one out. The batter grounds a ball up the middle. The second baseman goes fairly deep to his right to make the play, flips it (inaccurately – key to what follows) to the shortstop Tejada, who (he thinks) steps on second for the out, and twists his body oddly to get in position for a throw to first. But base-runner Chase Utley is by now barreling toward him, and he slides into him (a bit high), knocking him down, ending any possibility of a throw/double-play, and, in fact, breaking Tejada’s tibula (somewhat tangential to the discussion, but a fact that’s coloring a good deal of the discussion). The runner at third scored, and the game was tied.
2) The Replay Call
The umpire signaled Utley out at second, so he ran off the field. But the Dodgers challenged the call at second, and the replay indicated Tejada never quite touched second. (I’d have thought the “neighborhood play” might apply here – I’ve seen outs called where the fielder missed second by a far greater distance -- but the ruling was that the second baseman’s throw pulled Tejada away from the bag, which negated the possibility…a codicil to the neighborhood play with which I confess I’d never been familiar). The replay also showed that Headley never quite touched second, either, but the umpire decision was that he would have come back and done so had the initial call not been “out”. So he was awarded second base, and the Dodgers still only had one out.
This was crucial, because the Mets got the next out (which, without the overrule, would have ended the inning), but Gonzalez and Turner followed with doubles, which gave the Dodgers the three runs (one of them Headley’s) by which they won the game.
This was followed by screaming and arguing throughout the baseball universe. My take on each aspect:
Let’s start by saying, for most of the first century of baseball, there’d be no serious argument against Headley’s slide. Ty Cobb would have done three of those in a game; middle infielders took for granted base runners would do pretty much anything to break up rally-killing double-plays.
This changed to a degree in the 1977 playoffs, when Hal McRae took out Willie Randolph in a potential double-play situation. It’s worth looking at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIiYw53nGd0
McRae is obviously two feet past second base when he knocks Randolph over. Baseball got together (after the season) and decided that constituted interference. From henceforth, runners headed to second had to be at least within reach of the base when they knocked an infielder down. (It was dubbed the McRae rule.) Some runners pushed the bounds of the rule – being barely able to reach the base with their finger-tips – but, in general, things calmed down.
However, we’re in a different era now. We belatedly discovered the existence of the concussion in football. Buster Posey got hurt in a home plate collision, and suddenly we have different rules about what a catcher and runner can do when one is trying to prevent the other from scoring at the plate (I guess retroactively negating Pete Rose's winning run in the 1970 All-Star Game). There’s been far more concern about how far inside a pitcher can throw to a batter. Old-timers dismiss all this as some pussification of the game. Those seeing themselves as more enlightened feel like they’re trying to preserve the essence of the game without it evolving into brute sport.
Though my sympathies are with the latter, I think to some degree all this effort to protect players has been on a collision course with the root realities of the game. Baseball is of course far more civilized than hockey, football or rugby – but, still, moments occur in the game where two players have diametrically opposing goals, and in those moments something near-violent can occur. And how we feel about those moments can depend on who’s doing what to whom, or what we, in reflection, decide is the proper behavior – decisions made by the main actors in split-seconds, without benefit of weighing options.
I had an exchange late last night with a Met fan friend, who was fuming that Utley should have been called out for interference. And, sorry…I don’t see that at all. Utley is in no way in violation of the McRae rule; he’s well within the base-line the whole time. It’s certainly true that his focus by the time he arrived was on making Tejada incapable of throwing to first, not of securing second base, and I’ve heard some suggest that means it was a dirty play. I reject that, as well: everyone who’s ever done a take-out slide at second has had that same m.o., and it was never cause for calling interference before. The one element of the slide that evokes concern is the fact that Utley went in pretty high. Gary Sheffield last night suggested that Utley would have known by then the DP couldn’t be turned, and that doing it so high could only have been aimed at deliberately maiming Tejada. This might be so (though, again, it falls into the category of assuming a base runner makes clear choices like that in the heat of the moment). It’s interesting to me, however, that the one ex-player who had least problem with Utley’s slide was the one person who’s actually been in that spot: Cal Ripken.
It should also be noted that Chase Utley has something of a career reputation for being a rough player, which may well cause people to take a negative view here. There’s no sense pretending fans, players and the press are perfectly objective; a well-liked player can get away with things someone less popular can’t. (ARod trying to slap the ball out of the first baseman’s glove in 2004 is routinely cited as reasons why he’s the Worst Person in Baseball History; within a year or so of that event, Dustin Pedroia did the EXACT same thing – and he still stands on the all-time Good Guy list.)
Anyway, I can tell you the locals here in NY see no ambiguity. The headline on the Daily News is “Screwed!”, with “dirty slide” and “umps blow call” prominently featured. I have my great doubts that, had the same play occurred with the teams switched, we’d have seen anything like that reaction.
Bringing me to the second part: the safe call on Headley.
I’m thinking this might be the first case since the introduction of replay challenges that the TV-aided, and probably technically correct call, led to a less-defensible situation than the original, probably technically incorrect, call. I mean, I see the umpires’ thinking: Tejada never properly stepped on the base; Utley, had he not seen the “out” call, would almost surely have returned to second before the crippled Tejada could have tagged him; he certainly wouldn’t have run off the field without ever tagging up. Headley on second, one out, is probably how you have to call it.
But it seems absurd for that play to have ended with such a favorable outcome for the Dodgers. So, even if the original call was wrong, it would have felt a lot more fair to most of us for it to have been upheld. Truly weird.
So: changes in rules of contact and the introduction of replay – two very recent developments in the sport – united to create a play we’ll be talking about for a long time.