Manager Asks The Weird Questions

No spoilers here.

Day 108 Of The 2025 MLB Season
Jim Deshaies, in the Cubs booth, and Paul O’Neill, in the Yankees’, both said versions of “I’ve never seen that before,” so you know this’ll be good. It’s a 1-1 pitch to Justin Turner, and at the end you can hear some hollerin’ from the Cubs’ dugout, after which would follow 4 minutes and 15 seconds before the next pitch gets thrown. What happens in this quiet little clip that will inspire hollers and take four minutes to resolve?

After the clip cuts, Cubs manager Craig Counsell comes out to talk to the home plate umpire; that umpire goes to talk to the other umpires; the broadcast booths speculate, proposing that it could be:

• Maybe pitcher Max Fried isn’t making eye contact with Turner?

• Maybe the count is wrong?

• Maybe it’s a pitch clock violation?

• Maybe Counsell is issuing a delayed challenge, from some previous pitch? (?????)

All incorrect. What actually happened is Counsell thought that the pitch you just watched, an outside changeup that Turner passively watched the whole way, should have been called catcher’s interference. The interference, Counsell suggested, was at the feet.

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I say this with nothing but love and admiration: The Cubs here are behaving like they’re responding to a listener/reader email, which—if it were an actual email—would go something like:

We know that framing-focused modern catchers are setting up much closer to the batter’s box, and that some leg-out catchers are going so far as to put a foot all the way into the batter’s box. We also know, from Sam Miller’s frankly inspired writing about no-swing catcher’s interferences, that a batter doesn’t need to swing at a pitch to get credit for a catcher’s interference, just so long as the catcher’s reach makes contact with a bat that’s in the act of not swinging.

So, if the threshold for “interference” is a catcher merely infringing on the batter’s space—whether or not a real swing is being affected—then

1) Could a batter claim that a catcher who sets up with his foot in a batter’s box is interfering with him somehow—distracting him, restricting him—and challenge it?

2) What if the catcher’s foot actually touches the batter’s foot? Would it then be a clear case of interference, and/or would it matter if the touch had been brief and had ended by the time the pitch was thrown?

3) Could a batter engineer it so that he instigates interference-causing contact with the catcher’s outstretched leg, either by shuffling back in the box just as the pitcher is winding up or by sort of kicking or pivoting his plant foot backward a couple inches? If a hitter knows th catcher’s leg is just an inch or two away, isn’t there a free base just waiting to be claimed?

Great questions, hypothetical reader/listener/Cubs.

How did this weird idea occur to Counsell?

This play took place in the third inning, during Justin Turner’s second time up, with Austin Wells behind the plate. I watched every pitch of the first three innings from the first-base batter sideview camera, in which Cubs bench coach Ryan Flaherty is visible on nearly every pitch. While I can’t show you screengrabs from that angle, I think I can describe the Cubs’ shift into what we might call a podcaster mindset: