bjournal::juxtapoz

I didn’t know it was actually an issue, but apparently it is (or maybe it is just a slow news day). Here’s the situation: the Angels have one out, and Willits on third. They decide to attempt a squeeze. The batter whiffs on the bunt and Veritek chases Willits down the third base line, dives, and tags Willits out (twice, I’d say, by looking at the video). He then falls to the ground, takes a bounce, then the ball comes out. The umpire maintains the call.

The rules are fairly ambiguous on this (I know, I checked), which means it is in the judgement of the umpire who made th call, so consider this: a lot of things happen in baseball for which there is no rule. As an example, I’ve been watching a game where the commentator explains that on a 3-0 pitch, if the pitcher is anywhere close to the strike zone with a pitch, even if he misses, the umpire generally calls it a strike. As another example, many double plays, the fielder turning the play is given (in some cases, quite a bit of) leeway in tagging second before sending the ball on to first.

The common ground here is execution. In the 3-0 situation, the batter is clearly going to take the pitch; it happens nearly every time. In this situation, the batter is failing to execute and all the pitcher needs to do is passably execute. In the double play, if you’ve got a guy on first with one out, the batter’s only job is to not hit a infield grounder, if he does, he has failed to execute and all the person turning the double play has to do is passably execute. In the squeeze play, all Aybar had to do was bunt the ball fair, but he whiffed (failed to execute), and all Veritek had to do was apply the tag to Willits (passably execute). Is it right by the letter of the rules? Hard to say, but it is congruous with other calls made in baseball, and the fault lies not with the umpires but with the Angels for failure to execute.

And, incidentally, John Lackey is my new second-least favorite person in baseball. I don’t know who the previous one was, but Lackey just needs one or two more moments of a galactic lack of professionalism to overtake $-Rod:

We are way better than they are. We lost to a team not as good as us… [On Sunday] they scored on a pop fly they called a hit, which is a joke, [On Monday], they score on a broken-bat ground ball and a fly ball anywhere else in America [except in Fenway Park]. And [Pedroia’s] fist-pumping on second like he did something great

Actually, you are not, and were not, better than the Red Sox. Sure, you had a better overall record and beat the Red Sox eight of nine times during the regular season, but the Red Sox more than doubled your point differential over the course of the season, and played in a division where four out of the five teams finished above .500 (at least five games above, by the way), while seventeen other teams in baseball could have finished second to the Angels in the AL West (and you still only managed five more wins). Further, six of your eight wins against Boston came after the All-Star break and before Manny was let loose, three of those six David Ortiz was not playing in, and none of the 8 came with Jason Bay or Mark Kotsay on the team.

But I don’t even need to mention any of that. All that matters is that when it came down to the only part of the season that counts, the Angels were out-classed and bested in every conceivable way, and I was personally shocked that they didn’t get swept.