Game of oddities

Last night my friend Dave and I attended the game at TMP, as Dave's hometown Chicago White Sox are in town for a series against Your Seattle Mariners. It was a good time all around, but it was also one of the weirder games I've been privileged to see in person—not one, not two, but three things I'd never before seen in a baseball game happened last night.

First, in the opening frame a White Sox baserunner—Sam Antonacci, who had singled—tried to go first-to-third on a walk. As soon as "ball four" was announced on batter Munetaka Murakami, Antonacci sprinted to second base and just kept going, trying to steal third before the Mariners realized what was going on. It did not work, as pitcher Bryan Woo casually tossed the ball to third baseman Colt Emerson who easily tagged Antonacci out.

I get the thinking. I mean, on a walk the defensive team is usually just waiting for the batter to take off his elbow guard or whatever and make his way to first base, so if you're the runner at first it may seem like a cunning strategy to take them unawares. But dude, you're not that fast. Woo threw you out by 15 feet. Fun moment, though.

Then the real weirdness occurred in the bottom of the 3rd inning. Seattle catcher Jhonny Pereda was aboard at first base after being hit by a pitch. With one out, Julio Rodríguez then lined a laser beam to second baseman Antonacci, who appeared to allow the ball to hit the inside of his glove and fall to the ground, thus allowing him to attempt a double play. It seemed to work, the relay throw from the shortstop to first baseman was in plenty of time to double up the jogging Rodríguez; the inning was over and the White Sox began moving toward their dugout. But second-base umpire Mike Muchlinski waved his arms and pointed to second base and disallowed the double play, returning Pereda to first base and ruling Rodríguez's liner as caught, apparently retroactively.

Now, there is nothing illegal about deliberately allowing a would-be catch to bounce out of your glove; Antonacci, from what we could see anyway, was being a dick but not breaking the rules. Thus, my interpretation is that Muchlinski must have signaled catch/out prematurely, causing Rodríguez to give up his run to first base, and realizing his mistake was making a corrective ruling. His premature out call prevented Julio from running out the ball and thus the double play was unfair. I might be wrong in that assessment, perhaps Muchlinski saw the catch as a legitimate catch that Antonacci then dropped to fool the runners, but it seemed to us that it happened much too fast for that to be the case. And, as a softball umpire that has a bad habit of making calls a split second too soon, I empathize with the idea of having to correct a mistake.

But that was never-seen-it thing number two, never seen a double play disallowed before.

Then on the very next play, Randy Arozarena hit a drive into the left-field corner. As Pereda was rounding second base, he collided with shortstop Colson Montgomery, who was watching the ball with his back to the infield. This is what umpires refer to as "type-2 obstruction." Unlike with type-2 diabetes, you don't do anything to mitigate a type-2 obstruction, you just note it with a call/gesture and let the play continue, then when the play is over determine whether or not the obstruction actually made a difference in the result of the play. It is entirely up to the umpire's judgment whether or not to impose a penalty for the obstruction, which would be allowing the runner to achieve a base he didn't achieve during the play as it happened. Anyway, Pereda was delayed for perhaps half a second by the collision, continued around third base, and was thrown out by the left fielder by maybe 20 feet. It was not close, Pareda is not fast, and sending him past third was a mistake on the part of the Mariners' third-base coach. Nevertheless, after a lengthy conference between the four umpires, Pareda was awarded home due to the obstruction.

Because the conference took so long, Dave and I suspect there was disagreement between them and eventually the crew chief's opinion prevailed. Both of us thought that the delay was inconsequential. That half-second was not enough time for Pareda to have made up the 20 feet or so between him and the catcher when the catcher received the ball from left field. Thus, while Pareda being returned to first base on the previous play we adjudicated as proper given the interpretation of remedying an ump's mistake, we deemed awarding the run to the Mariners here as unreasonable.

Regardless, I had never seen an obstruction call play out like that before, let alone one called, in my opinion, erroneously.

Fortunately, that run didn't matter in the end. Josh Naylor lined out to end the frame in the next at-bat, and the M's had put up another run by the time Chicago had scored even once (on a solo homer in the 7th). The M's capped the scoring in the bottom of the 8th when 20-year-old rookie Colt Emerson barely cleared the right-field wall with his first big-league hit, a three-run homer over the head of White Sox RF Jarred Kelenic, who himself was a highly-regarded Mariner rookie whose first hit was a home run a few years back. Kelenic ended up being a flop (though I suppose he could still redeem himself somewhat). Emerson will have to wait and see, it was only his second game.

So, good game to have chosen, fun was had, and even though Dave was disappointed in the outcome, his team is still over .500 while the M's are still under. Go figure.