A Brief Note on Supposed Home-Run Robbery and Certainty
I like the postseason but on this score it fails: it precludes us from saying anything too definitive about baseball broadly understood. The sample size is just too small. Guys are tired. There are so many pitchers, and a lot of them are used in funny ways. We can’t feel secure that the knowledge gleaned there means anything. Still, October does manage to reveal some truths. For all its oddity, it seeks out certainties. It has replay.
To wit, as Jeff detailed Wednesday night’s ALCS game featured a controversial Joe West fan-interference call on a would-be Jose Altuve home run. The call was challenged but was allowed to stand because replay officials couldn’t determine if the fans entered the field of play to prevent Mookie Betts from catching the ball. (If Betts were judged to have entered the stands, the interference question would be moot, under rule 6.01(e) of the Official Baseball Rules 2018 edition, and also the general principle that teenagers in horror films ought to know better than to go into the basement.)
Here are the fans in question. An obvious bunch of leaning scamps, but a blurry bunch at a tough angle.
The officials’ struggle to reach a definitive conclusion, to find “clear and convincing evidence,” was largely the result of this man, whose body happened to block the one view of the play the replay center needed most.
It is here, in our failed quest to be sure, that we learn something. We find that it is possible to be simultaneously quite good and quite bad at one’s job.
Quite good, because surely displaying a close, keen interest in the goings on at the wall is importantly necessary to assuring the physical safety of both players and fans; quite bad, because, entirely by accident, this security man has robbed us of our ability to be sure, at precisely the moment we crave being sure the most. We are secure in body but unmoored in the mind, and him? He is Schrödinger’s Employee of the Month.
Betts maybe wasn’t interfered with. Joe West probably got the initial call wrong; sometimes we can hazard a confident guess. But absent certainty on either score, there is some value, especially in times when we can claim to know so little, in confirming that humans are possessed of multitudes, even if only in small samples.
Meg is the editor-in-chief of FanGraphs and the co-host of Effectively Wild. Prior to joining FanGraphs, her work appeared at Baseball Prospectus, Lookout Landing, and Just A Bit Outside. You can follow her on Bluesky @megrowler.fangraphs.com.
I do not think we can say with any certainty that he is Schrödinger’s Employee of the Month. We can know either that Schrödinger is who he typically works for or whether he is currently employed, but we cannot know both.
The “quite good/quite bad” lesson is sometimes also relearned when encountering someone at work who is talented but largely unmotivated.
Wow. This play has reached the non-objective reality theory level of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave! Baseball is but the shadows of puppets against the wall of a cave.
I dont understand why MLB doesn’t just use 2 billion laser pointers at each stadium to prevent this sort of thing.
…It seems so easy and straightforward of a solution.
Doesn’t statcast know exactly where the ball was when it’s trajectory was interrupted by glove/fans?
You, know those people are standing right in front of their seats and slightly reaching forward. They can’t reach the padding (which is where in play begins under MMP ground rules).
They can’t reach the padding? As in the padding of the wall?
The man in the white shirt has a grasp firmly on the padding in the first screenshot.
But, you see, Eusebio wanted Houston to win that game so shut up!
Odd that the people faulting the security guy are certain that nobody else (in front of him) was also blocking the shot. Most likely they were.
This security guard has taken so much heat for this when, a: he was exactly where he was supposed to be and b: lots of other people where also in the way.