Red Sox Aren’t Big Fans Of Larry Vanover

Ross was steamed after Vanover made his call. Positively steamed, like vegetables. He calmed down only a little before the post-game interviews. From Mike Petraglia:

Some people will call the Red Sox sore losers, and note that Vanover isn’t the reason the Red Sox got shut out. But then, the Red Sox lost 1-0, and the controversial at-bat came with the tying and winning runs on base. The Red Sox are being sore losers here, but only because a loss like that ought to leave them sore. They should be upset, because that conclusion was pretty bad.

For the most part, this was just another baseball game. A low-scoring baseball game, but a fairly unremarkable baseball game. Shields nearly went the distance, which was something. Bard walked seven batters, which isn’t good, but Bard also struck out seven batters, which is good. The Rays had seven hits. The Red Sox had four hits.

And so began the controversial at-bat. The home-plate umpire was Larry Vanover. The common technique here is to paste in a strike-zone image from MLB’s Gameday or some other source. I’m going to bypass that in favor of game screenshots, because I think they’re more telling.