Sunday, May 05, 2013
WaPo: Bryce Harper ejected in first inning arguing check swing
(www.washingtonpost.com)
posted on May 05, 2013 at 07:12 PM by Esoteric throws a 'hard slider' to nationals, umpires, washington
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105 comment(s)
The latest Rohrshach test the swiftly emerging Umps Behaving Badly narrative:
Read More...Bryce Harper was ejected in the first inning of the Nationals’ 6-2 victory over the Pirates Sunday afternoon after he drew the ire of umpiring crew chief John Hirschbeck with his reaction to a check-swing third strike. The incident left the Nationals without their best player and, owing to behavior from Hirschbeck that Manager Davey Johnson deemed overaggressive, raised the issue of contentious relations between ...
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1 2 3 >I hate this submisstion system. So clugy, so unforgiving, no way to go back and fix mistakes.
Agreed, because you can definitely argue it and that's a really small pool of noteworthy plays.
Same here. I really thought it was going to be spectacular.
Ok, the announcers go over the top. Still a great catch.
It was a nice catch and a great way to end a ballgame. But do you think it was worthy of creating "I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” kind of comments?
You guys are such curmudgeons.
Well, Hutcheson is just a bitter Atlanta fan. Whatever the true quality of that catch was, what was spectacular yesterday was the way Cole Hamels utterly humiliated the Braves.
Maybe they meant as a game-ending, game-saving catch.
I don't know that anybody above is really disagreeing with that. Within the context of the game, watching it as it happens, of course a Nats fan is going to be justifiably excited to see the game end on a play like that. And I agree with #13, his disappearing from view briefly kind of adds to the coolness factor. But just the technical merit of the catch: that's not really in the conversation for best play of the year; it's nowhere near as impressive as Trout robbing a home run from a few weeks ago, for example.
The wannabes and hangers on always adjudge themselves by reference to their betters.
Oh I agree, to his credit though, he did cover a hell of a lot of ground.
I doubt it's the best game-ending, game-saving catch FP has seen.
Reading the comments in the excerpt (but not Sam's) before seeing the video, I assumed I was going to see something like the Wise play or the Trout play or the Buehrle play.
Or something like this. Now that was a "holy crap" moment.
Very very nice catch in a big situation, a lot of guys wouldn't have made it. But I don't think it deserves the word "spectacular."
What, you mean noted paragons of objectivity Bob Carpenter and FP Santangelo overreacted to a Nats play? Unthinkable.
Related to nothing, Carpenter says "are you kidding me?" way too often. Like twice a game.
No. As long as he doesn't come down before he catches the ball, the out is recorded. A player wouldn't be allowed to leap the fence, establish his feet, and record the out.
Torii Hunter also did not know.
The situation, the fact that he lept out of view and the fact that he probably crashed into the wall really make this one an exciting play though.
They address that a guy can fall into the stands after making a catch (in which case runners can advance), and they define a catch in 2.00, but I don't see where it's clear that you can't vault a low fence (as say in Fenway's RF) and make a legal catch.
Interesting. Good to know. Seems a bit arbitrary, but the line has to be drawn somewhere arbitrary at the end of the day.
Googling "Amazing catch Washington Nationals" gives me this leaping Roger Bernadina catch from last year.
EDIT: Wrong year.
We've had a thread on that catch before (see posts 11-16), in which I asked this exact question. It doesn't seem clear from the rules one way or the other.
Yes, I edited my post to reflect that.
Well, are they? Don't leave us in suspense.
OK, what I said above was only half right (I think). He can't establish contact with the other side, but it isn't as simple as just being in air. He must also have part of his foot somewhere inside the field of play, as noted in the rulebook here (assuming the same rule applies to fair balls as foul balls. It's the closest thing to an on-point ruling I've found):
A fielder, in order to make a catch on a foul ball nearing a dugout or other out-of-play area (such as the stands), must have one or both feet on or over the playing surface (including the lip of the dugout) and neither foot on the ground inside the dugout or in any other out-of-play area.
In this case, it's impossible to tell for certain whether any of his body was still in the field of play when he made the catch. If you look at the still image in one of the other linked You Tube videos, you can see that it was going to be really close (though my guess is since the ball was likely moving faster than the foot, he was just barely in play when the catch was recorded).
Yeah, it's really really close, and my assumption going in (base instinct; i.e. wild guess) would be that if his entire body were already over the fence when he made the catch, it shouldn't be an out. But on that play (especially in the minors) the umps going to give the out for the effort, I suspect.
I'd love to see something like this come up in the Majors, say in a playoff game in Fenway or something.
It was a college conference tournament game, so he essentially saved his team's season (though the homer would have only tied the score). And his coach was retiring after the season, so the catch assured him at least one more game.
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