The Mets won a game yesterday in a somewhat ugly fashion. As home plate umpire Ron Kulpa admitted after the game, Michael Conforto should have been called out on strikes when he was hit on the arm by a ball in the strike zone. Those are the hard facts of the matter. When folks start speculating on other things, such as Conforto's intent or whether that play definitively cost Miami the game, that's where they lose me.
Don't get me wrong here. I would have been quite upset if the Mets lost a game in that manner. One of my least favorite parts of modern MLB baseball is hitters being allowed to put on protective armor and crowd the plate. In some extreme cases, I've even seen hitters in their stance with part of their front arm actually encroaching into the strike zone. I can't recall ever seeing an umpire instruct a hitter to back off the plate a little on those occasions. It's something that's been tolerated since that armor has come into use.
Hitters do that in an attempt to take the inside of the strike zone away from pitchers. Barry Bonds was a notable example of this, as was Chase Utley. I remember watching Utley get on base in exactly this manner many times against the Mets, including critical late-game situations. I never saw him denied first base for doing it, not ever, not even once. Utley was awarded first base over 200 times in his career for being hit by a pitch, approximately once every 38.5 PA.
As for whether any batter lets a pitch hit him "on purpose," we can try to read his intent, but we'll never really know. I watched the replay of that AB several times because I was curious, and I never had a definitive answer. When a pitch is close, almost every batter instinctively turns their body inward, as Conforto did. This action actually pushed part of the arm further into the plate. Whether Conforto actually made a split-second decision to let the ball hit him, only he knows. If anyone else is "sure" that he did, I could only envy your mind-reading skills. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It still should have been strike 3.
Someday soon, we will have robot umpires calling balls and strikes. Presumably, this play would not have happened if they were in place now. The strike would have been called, and Conforto would have been out. No question of intent would matter.
What wouldn't be fixed by that would be if the pitch was an inch off the plate inside, and Conforto made no effort to get out of the way of it. If you're the home plate umpire, what would you call? I believe most umpires would call it a hit by pitch. It might not be as ugly as when it happens on an actual strike, but it's still ugly. I see no reason to believe that this tactic will go away anytime soon.
That's a hard, split second reaction for a hitter to make. He was clearly leaning in, and started to move his arm away in a circular motion - but the circle was wide, and he did not jerk backwards. It does seem like it was premeditated - if I am not swinging, and I think it is in the high, inside corner of the strike zone, I'll move the arm into harm's way.
ReplyDeleteIt worked, but no doubt Pete would have preferred to get up and hit a walk off grand slam.
The team should start hitting much more, and such machinations will not be necessary.