Major League Baseball’s lousy umpires — and my goodness, there is a load of those guys — reared their ugly heads again on Monday night.
A bad call, and I mean a very bad call, cost the Minnesota Twins a ninth-inning tie in a 14-13 loss at Oakland.
With two outs in the top of the ninth, Michael Cuddyer on second base and pinch runner Carlos Gomez on first, Oakland right-hander Michael Wuertz threw a wild pitch. Cuddyer hit third base at full speed and started heading home once he saw the ball bounce all the way to the backstop.
He slid into home plate, underneath Wuertz’s tag and was not only safe on every replay, but safe in real time.
But that’s when a call for replay in Major League Baseball was heard loudly in my living room. An umpire named Mike Muchlinski called Cuddyer out. I’m all for hiring the blind, but that call was ridiculous. Muchlinski owes all of baseball an apology, not just the Twins.
Granted, the Twins once had a 12-2 lead in that ball game and the bullpen blew its collective brains out. However, be that as it may, it’s no excuse for a brutally bad call with two out in the ninth.
When are those bat-blind big league umpires — there were three other bad calls on the highlight reels on Monday night — going to accept the fact that replay is like having an assistant. It’s not a tool designed to show anybody up. Hell, with HD screens and slow-motion replay, the umpires are being shown up every single night in the Majors. This year, there have been so many bad calls, it’s getting hard to keep up.
Monday night, the Twins were robbed. According to the St. Paul Pioneer Press: “Replays showed Cuddyer — who said after the game, ‘no doubt in my mind I was safe’ — slid in safely under the tag, but the Twins didn’t need to see a replay.” Nor did anybody with weak vision who happened to be impaired by drugs or alcohol. A drunk person could have seen clearly that Cuddyer beat the throw.
Baseball needs one of two things; (a) better umpires or (b) instant replay. Since it’s likely impossible to find anyone to fit category a, I opt for category b. Bring in instant replay for every disputed play, right freakin’ now.
Because the call on Monday night was so bad, it made the game look fixed. And the last thing baseball needs are fixers to go with all those steroid users.