CALLING ALL EXPERTS
A forensic scientist. A physicist. A judge. How would THEY get to the bottom of the 3rd out that wasn't?
By James Janega
Tribune staff reporter
Published October 14, 2005
If you were a crime scene investigator officiating the game, you would have wanted to seal off home plate.
You would search behind the plate for impression evidence, for what is called "compression tool marks"--but which really just means "where the ball hit," if it did.
You would inspect the ball for striations and dirt particles and compare their refractive index with soil minerals. You'd hunt for more video documentation.
Still, said Mick Kopina, group supervisor in the microscopy and trace unit at the Illinois State Police Crime Lab, "If I was the catcher responsible for the third out, if you don't hear him say `out,' your job is to stand up and tag the guy."
But it was no crime scene, at least as far as Chicago sports fans were concerned. In the clutch situation was plate umpire Doug Eddings. And still in question is what happened.
In viewing the replays of what may become the Zapruder film of baseball, fans accustomed to excruciating observation and difficult decisions in their own professions could agree Thursday only on the basics of the play:
The call setting up a ninth-inning White Sox victory in Game 2 of the American League Championship Series against the visiting Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim belonged to Eddings alone, and it was as tough as they come.
Had they been there behind the plate, a federal judge would have cried for more evidence, an economist would have sought a less stressful decision, and physicists would see in it an experiment that needed to be re-created again and again and again.
The confusion begins in a confluence of regulations, Major League Baseball rules 6.05 (b) and 6.09 (b), bound now to be remembered by a generation of sports enthusiasts. A catcher must have "legally caught" the third strike in flight; a batter becomes a runner when a third strike is not caught and first base is unoccupied. But was the third strike caught in flight, or not?
U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen, forming an opinion on "kind of prima facie evidence," decided that "the umpire's call was correct."
"Having said that, everything occurred in a split second. And even the slow-motion camera doesn't really capture totally what happened," Aspen added.
The judge said the primary evidence was the videotape and photographs. But if the play came up in his courtroom, he'd want to assess the demeanor of its key witnesses--Eddings, Sox batter A.J. Pierzynski and Angels catcher Josh Paul. He'd want to see physical evidence before making a decision.
"And of course, if that were to come up in my courtroom, it would be my obligation to tell the attorneys where my sympathies lie," Aspen said. "How can one live in the city of Chicago in 2005, when we haven't had a baseball team of any accomplishment for decades, and say that you're not a White Sox fan?" Aspen also gives a passing grade to Eddings.
"There are close calls, somebody has to make them, and I feel a lot of empathy with the umpire because he is dealing with a close call," Aspen said. "And no matter what he did, somebody would have been unhappy with him."
The Official Major League Baseball Rules Book has 104 pages. The slightly thicker "The Physics of Baseball," by Yale physicist Robert K. Adair, has 142 pages, but in an e-mail Adair said the rules mattered more than physics Wednesday night, and he was stuck thinking about who saw the play closest, and how they interpreted what they saw.
"From the TV replays, I would say we are talking about quarter-inch," he said. "Did the ball touch the ground as it went into Josh Paul's glove or didn't it? Only God knows. I note that there are physical limits to the acuity of the TV camera or the third base umpire and those limits are of the order of quarter-inch."
No one could be sure, Adair concluded.
But Adair (who admitted to being a White Sox fan) said he was impressed Pierzynski ran. "Remarkable!" he wrote. "Most batters would have just sat down."
University of Chicago sports economist Allen Sanderson noted that umpires' decisions are made quickly and under enormous pressure. And Eddings picked the more stressful of two options.
"The low-cost, easy way out would be to watch the body language of the catcher and the batter," Sanderson said. "If I had to make that split second decision, I would have looked at the body language of the catcher and the batter. It would have been `I swung and missed'; `I caught the ball.' And that would have been it."
As a Sox fan, he has rationalized away what he thought at first was a bad call. "The Angels allowed a stolen base. Then the Angels' pitcher hung a ball to [Joe] Crede on the 0-2 count," Sanderson said. "Those other two things weren't a judgment call."
Fermilab cosmologist Edward W. "Rocky" Kolb saw pitfalls in such outside perceptions. Sox fans will see the call one way, Angels fans the other.
"When you try to analyze data from a very complicated experiment, it's very easy to pull out of it what you want to," he said. "The hardest thing to pull out of it is something you're not looking for or something you don't want to see."
He added: "I would say as a completely objective White Sox fan, it's clear the ball was dropped."
The play, he guesses, will be talked about for years unless the Angels win the series.
"That could have been the first time quantum physics has entered a baseball game," he mused, before suggesting after some rumination that the ball was both caught and not caught.
Two opposite things can happen at once in quantum physics. But not in baseball.
- - -
Did the umpire drop the ball?
Wednesday's controversial play falls under 6.05(b) and 6.09(b) of Major League Baseball's official rules:
6.05 A batter is out when ... (b) A third strike is legally caught by the catcher; "legally caught" means in the catcher's glove before the ball touches the ground.
6.09 The batter becomes a runner when ... (b) The third strike called by the umpire is not caught, providing (1) first base is unoccupied, or (2) first base is occupied with two out; when a batter becomes a base runner on a third strike not caught by the catcher and starts for the dugout, or his position, and then realizes his situation and attempts then to reach first base, he is not out unless he or first base is tagged before he reaches first base. If, however, he actually reaches the dugout or dugout steps, he may not then attempt to go to first base and shall be out.
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