Okay, the Sox won last night. It wasn’t pretty, and it might not have been the correct call, but a win is a win. I for one am glad that the umpires’ call was the final say in the matter. If this were a football game, all the replay cameras would be out, the diagrams on the screen would be flashing like heat lightning, and the commentators would be spitting and screaming enough to require squeegees and tarps in the broadcast booth. This is just one reason why baseball is superior to football: the human element has not been sacrificed to the machine (and by machine, I don’t mean just the camera, but also the entire lurching, faceless, bone-crunching apparatus that is the NFL).
Angels manager Mike Scioscia had the most class I think I have ever seen under such pressure. When he said that regardless of the dispute his team didn’t play well enough to win, he could’ve been speaking for the Sox as well.
Here’s something to be EXTRA thankful for: Had this happened in a Yankees—Red Sox series, we’d be hearing about the damn play for the rest of our natural lives. The East Coast hacks would have elevated it’s importance to something around the level of the firing on Fort Sumter or the Kennedy assassination. Epic poems would be written about it, lives would be sacrificed defending the ump’s decision, whole generations of East Coast children would be raised in hate and fear as their parents taught them that it is a cruel and random universe.
So, thank you, Angels, for safeguarding the sanity of the rest of the nation. You guys took one for the rest of us.