Day 53 Of The 2025 MLB Season
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Day 54 Of The 2025 MLB Season
Logan O’Hoppe hit a groundball into the hole between third and short. Jacob Wilson fielded it, but his jump throw was up the first base line. The first baseman Nick Kurtz came way off the bag to get it, then swiped a tag toward O’Hoppe. The first base umpire, Andy Fletcher, ruled the runner safe, no tag.
The A’s challenged the call. Replays were… so close. Did Kurtz get him? From one angle, mayyyyyybe. But from another angle, ehhhhhhhh. Slow it down enough, zoom in enough, and you could definitively say hrmmmmmm. But New York replay saw enough, and relayed its decision back to Andy Fletcher, who was also the crew chief. Fletcher took off the headset, turned on his microphone, and announced that
The ruling on the field is overturned,
The runner’s sleeve was tagged,
Barely.
The umpires generally announce these overturned calls with as little emotion as a pre-recorded phone tree prompts you to press four to speak to pharmacy services. But an overturned call must sting a little bit, and this is probably the only time in sports that we demand somebody on the field get on the PA system and announce that they blew it. The shortstop can just kick a little dirt around to show remorse for an error, rather than get on the PA and apologize. The manager who biffs a pitching decision might have to explain it to the public, but only in the relative comfort of his office and only after an hour or so has passed and things have calmed down. The umpire, on the other hand, must immediately stand facing the crowd, turn on a microphone, and announce that an audit has found his mistake. He doesn’t actually apologize, but it’s a little bit implied. He doesn’t say “I suck,” but from the fan’s perspective it’s a little bit inferred.
That must stink! And Andy Fletcher, in this case, clearly doesn’t think it’s all that fair. He had a nearly impossible call to make, particularly from where he was (correctly) positioned. So he editorializes a little. It starts out subtle: You can hear some eye-rolling in the way he intones “overturned.” Then, instead of stopping there, he overexplains: The runner’s sleeve was tagged. Fletcher hits “sleeve” in a way that makes it sound like, hey man, sleeves, should they even count, are they even real?
But the most memorable part is the barely. Almost all overturned calls are barely. But this barely was so barely that Fletcher wants to make sure you know, barely.
bare·ly
/ˈberlē/
1. only just; almost not.
So the correct call was “out,” and Fletcher had to admit it. It’s only just, but it’s almost not.
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Day 55 Of The 2025 MLB Season
In the third inning on May 20, Walker Buehler didn’t like a non-strike call, told the umpire Mike Estabrook that the pitch was right down the middle, and Estabrook took off his mask. Estabrook walked out onto the field, telling Buehler he’d better not take a step off the mound or else, and when Buehler took some steps off the mound Estabrook chucked him. It was one of the more sudden and disruptive ejections of the year. There were lots of great angles of this confrontation. There was also, before Estabrook took off his mask, an umpire cam running.
The umpire camera has become a wonderful source of entertainment, but not in either of the ways I’m pretty sure it was intended. Whoever pitched the umpire cam surely meant for it to show one of two things:
What a close call looked like from the view of the person who had to make the call. But it’s low res, jerky—if you want to see whether Nick Kurtz’ tag touched the runner’s sleeve, barely, you want to see the freeze-mo cam, not the $189 go-pro.
What a pitch looks like coming in. The problem with this, as I’ve written, is that it’s not actually a great view of the pitch—narrow and low-res. More importantly, it’s not a view we’re super used to. We’ve seen trillions of pitches from the center field camera, enough that we now know exactly what a strike looks like and what pitch movement looks like.
The brain does incredible things when it has experienced a ton of something. Having read billions of words in your life, you can now just glance at a bunch of these tiny arbitrary symbols and decode huge blocks of them instantly, even see beauty in them. Same with the familiar center field camera view of pitches, compared to the relatively unfamiliar ump cam view of pitches.
But what the brain has done more than any other thing in all the world is decode other people’s facial expressions. It’s the first complex thing our brain solves, when we’re babies staring up at adults. That’s where the ump cam is perfect. When a player looks directly at the ump cam—whether angrily or just inquisitively—it really does feel like he’s looking right at us. We see the emotions taking place between these figures, intimately, and we’re trained since birth to decode and even feel these interactions. Something like this might be my single favorite shot of the 2025 baseball season:
In the Buehler incident, the umpire cam gave us this tiny shot of Buehler’s catcher Carlos Narváez, before all the yelling started, turning around and giving the umpire a very brief, wordless look.
Now you know exactly how catchers look at an umpire after a missed call, and because you’re a human-face decoder with decades of experience, you now know exactly what it feels like for the umpire to get that look. If the goal of TV broadcasts is to put you inside the action so you know how it feels to be in a major league game, then that right there is it.
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Day 56 Of The 2025 MLB Season
