On Wednesday, Grant Brisbee wrote this brief item on Tim Welke's missed call in the Dodgers/Rockies game. If you haven't seen it yet, here it is, in both still and moving form:
Tim Welke Cracks The Top Ten Worst Umpiring Calls Ever
Tim Welke’s missed call in the Dodgers/Rockies game was one of the most blatant misses ever. Why can’t we have these calls reviewed?
The runner was called out, which he might have been in an alternate reality, but not here on Earth.
At the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, I’ll just link to the five other previous features I have written on this topic in the past year. The need for replay is obvious, and I don’t want to belabor the issue, but perhaps you should hear it from some of the baseball people who were actually involved in the game.
“Neighborhood?” Helton quipped. “It wasn’t in the same area code.”
“To be honest, when I saw them come off the field, I thought Helton had backpicked [Andre] Ethier off second base,” Hairston said. “I knew I was safe, then I heard the crowd so that’s what I thought happened. Then Davey told me I was out and I was like, ‘What?’Dodgers manager Don Mattingly:
“He knows he missed it, I think [Todd] Helton told him,” said Mattingly. “It doesn’t matter, it’s not here nor there.“Well, yes, it does matter. Neither Welke -- who was the crew chief -- nor any of his umpiring crew-mates would comment on this awful call. Would it have had any impact on the game? The call resulted in the end of the half-inning; if Hairston had been properly called safe, the Dodgers would have had runners on first and second with two out. Might they have scored, and possibly won the game? We’ll never know.
The results of the game should reflect what the players actually do on the field, not the opinion of one man dressed in black. MLB has to get a replay review system operational. Yesterday wouldn’t have been too soon.
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