No one is referring to the pitcher’s mound at U.S. Cellular Field as the grassy knoll. For one thing, it doesn’t have grass. Yet the video of Wednesday’s pivotal 9th inning strikeout call in the Sox-Angels playoff is being slow-moed and analyzed frame-by-frame like it had been shot by Abraham Zapruder. As baseball controversies go, it is the kind that will fuel arguments for decades.
Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski whiffed at a very low pitch for strike three, but he wound up on first base, and the pinch runner who took his place later scored the winning run. How Pierzynski got on base is a credit to his heads-up play, a great bluff that induced a horrible call by plate umpire Doug Eddings, or a brain cramp by Angels catcher Josh Paul.
What is clear is that Pierzynski took advantage of a rule of baseball. If a ball touches the ground when a batter fans, it doesn’t count as an out unless he is tagged by the catcher or thrown out at first base. Every player knows that.
Paul insisted he caught the ball without its touching the ground. He thought the inning was over and started to trot off the field. But Pierzynski ran to first, and the umpire ruled that Paul had trapped the ball in the dirt. No amount of screaming and gesticulating by furious Angels could change the ump’s mind. The replays proved that, well, it depends on which team you’re rooting for.
“We wuz robbed,” the media from the West Coast howled in unison.
“We wuz smart,” crowed White Sox partisans, albeit somewhat sheepishly.
The view here is that they’re all correct. The ump blew the call, and the Sox took smart advantage of that.
Now, this is the team managed by the estimable Ozzie Guillen, who declared earlier this year that in baseball “everybody cheats.” Guillen went on in ill-advised fashion: “If you don’t get caught, you’re a smart player or pitcher. … As long as they win games, I hope they cheat.”
But this wasn’t cheating. Pierzynski knew the rule and smartly decided to test it. What did he have to lose?
Paul was adamant that he caught strike three and that Eddings had failed to signal otherwise. But Paul could have avoided any ambiguity by simply tagging Pierzynski. The Sox catcher followed a maxim drilled into players from Little League on: Run out every play. Did Pierzynski, as they say in baseball, “deek” the umpire into a bad call? Nah.
The call helped the Sox even the American League Championship Series at one game apiece. And, perhaps even better for some Sox fans, it gave them a new opportunity to needle Cubs fans.
Cubs fans have learned that chance plays can carry cruel consequences. When the Cubs last made the playoffs in 2003, fan Steve Bartman got in the way of a crucial late-inning out and the Cubs lost to the Florida Marlins. For the Sox, think of Paul as the anti-Bartman.
Paul is a Buffalo Grove native and a former member of the White Sox. When the Sox beat Boston in the first round of the playoffs, the second game turned on a Red Sox error by another former White Sox player, Tony Graffanino.
It’s not the stuff of grassy knoll conspiracies. But it will make for great lore if–let’s say when–the Sox win the World Series.
