02 June 2010

Oh, Wow.

Armando Galarraga:
9 1/3 innings
0 Walks
0 Errors
0 Hits
1 Blown call

Heartbreaking.

6 comments:

Christina said...

Bleagh! Yes :(

Unknown said...

Once in a lifetime night man. I started with it on the radio, so by 6-7th didn't want to change anything, so did not turn on tv. Waited until play was in process, turned on to see celebration... that wasn't. Tough to describe, but chances of ever seeing it again are nil. Selig should overturn, to scared to set precedent?

Will Bloomfield said...

It really is unbelievable.

Somebody Calls Me Nana said...

That girl certainly is pretty!
And that blown call was unbelievable!
Jim Joyce has been extremely apologetic and Gallaraga has been a real man about the whole thing...errrrgggggg!

big daddy said...

Galarraga is completely a class act. Jim Joyce, pretty much the same. Even Leyland, after the obligatory altercation, has been a complete gentleman.
In his book Men at Work, George Will argues that striving for athletic excellence, especially in baseball, is a moral activity. If true, there is no better exemple of that proposition than how these men, and the whole Tigers team, have responded to that bad call. Reversing the call at this point would cheapen the whole event.

Craig said...

Heartbreaking, for sure, and on multiple, textured levels. That Jim Joyce, who is widely regarded as one of the best umpires in the game, made one of the most awful bad calls in the history of the game, is part of the whole tragedy of it. (And I am here using 'awful' in a sense of describing the magnitude and impact of the moment, not the execrable-ness of the call. And Joyce should, after all, be given credit for making the call as he, however mistakenly, saw it; he was certainly aware of the magnitude of the moment, and that he was willing to make a call like that speaks to a strength of his character)

I agree w/ Big Daddy, that overturning the call after-the-fact, gratifying as it might be, would ultimately cheapen the whole thing. There is so much to the story as it actually is - of human fallen-ness, and forgiveness, and reconciliation, etc, etc - that to trade it all for a line in the record book comes almost to seem trite.

Americans have this knee-jerk thing about using technology to 'get it right', and it's easy enough to understand that. But I wonder - at what point does it start to become the least bit 'dehumanizing' that even our games have to be scrupulously arbitrated down to the finest milliseconds by robotic judges?

(And yeef; is that just the most god-awful, high-falutin thing you've ever read about baseball? George Will and Bart Giamatti have got nothin' on me, I tell ya. . .)