So, after the Yankees got away with the torpedo bats there was all of this smoke about how the Yankees would never be properly penalized for anything. And they were kind of right, the Yankees have just been penalized improperly ever since.
The umpiring against this team lately. Good lord. It's not exactly costing us games, so it's not the kind we can really take to task, but it's been terrible. First Jazz Chisholm gets tossed for disagreeing with a call, then gets suspended for tweeting 'not even close' about it after the game. Then yesterday, Aaron Judge hits a home run that the umps refuse to count as anything other than a foul, which allows a prompt strikeout on a called strike that wasn't even close. The fact that Judge came extremely close to losing his cool and didn't, but as Aaron Boone came out to back him up he was thrown out in seconds...that's an agenda. Then after a solid minute of Boone arguing with umpires, the official scorer decides, 'hey, you know what? That Paul Goldschmidt error from two innings ago that was the only thing that came close to breaking this no-hitter Max Fried has going? Suddenly, now, at this unrelated point in the game, I think that was a hit'.
Which was decided between innings, during a commercial break. While Fried was warming up to try and keep the no-no going into the eighth. Fried immediately giving up a hit then is besides the point. It was a suspect and incomprehensible move.
There's a sort of unwritten politeness in it, where if you're going to overturn a call, especially when a no-hitter is on the line, do it while the play is still live. Don't wait around for two innings. Because Fried went two more innings thinking he had a no-no going and needed to stay in the game. If that hit gets counted in inning 6, he doesn't need to stay in for the eighth. And in this era of MLB pitching, keeping a pitcher in past the seventh is a risky play, as you could keep him up there and within two weeks there's arm tightness. If Max Fried gets injured as a result of having to pitch the eighth when he didn't need to, that scorer needs to send Fried a check or something. Because that's entirely his fault.
The thing that many people with status are miffed about is what Michael Kay did during the broadcast. I was watching, we cut back in with the hit on the board and Kay was PISSED. You could tell that he'd just gotten some cursing out of his system before they went live but he still had some angst leftover. The broadcast cut to the scorer who made the decision, put his name up there in big letters, BILL MATHEWS, and kept it up for 10 seconds. As Michael Kay seethed behind it. 'THERE HE IS. GET HIM'. Not verbatim but that was kind of the gist of it.
People are mad about that. They're saying it was unprofessional of Kay for spotlighting an official after a decision he didn't agree with. I honestly think it was more unprofessional to overturn an error immediately after a manager argues with your calls, but apparently the moral high ground is that Kay was the one that made the mistake and not the one who works in the field of 'getting things wrong for a living and having a good enough union to still make money from it'.
You know what would have been unprofessional? If Kay had put Mathews' address up there. Of a picture of one of his summer homes. All he did was just figure that the fanbase should put a face to the discrepancy, and that it wasn't some elite in a suit but just some regular old guy with no deep pockets...who could probably be taken in a fistfight.
The Yankees won the game, ultimately, and it was a shutout. But Judge still hit a home run, and Fried still had a no-no going. The officiating team was simply wrong, and will go unchecked in being wrong. And Rob Manfred is in no rush to employ automatic officiating systems because he doesn't want a union to stick him in a car boot and push him off the Golden Gate Bridge. Nothing will be done, nobody will learn, and everybody will get madder. Such is life right now.
As for the Yankees themselves, barring some infuriation, like Devin Williams just not figuring shit out in pinstripes, Chisholm and Volpe's averages, and the back half of the rotation, I like the look of this team. Judge has a .397 average, 25 RBIs, 7 homers and 31 hits. Absolutely unreal. Grisham's gotten hot as hell too, which is a pretty welcome development. This team's a little rough around the edges at the moment, but they could toughen up and go deep. Just keep those big wins coming.
Coming Tomorrow- The closest thing the Marlins have to a star hitter right now.
[P.S.- Anyone infuriated by the points made during this post can send any hate mail to BILL MATHEWS, P.O. Box 666, Tampa, FL.]
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