John Farrell and Dustin Pedroia both go off on an umpire but only one gets ejected

With Boston down 2-1 in Game 4 of the ALDS to the Astros, their backs against the wall in the series and attempting to save their season, Dustin Pedroia stepped to the plate.

There was only one out in the inning and the bases were loaded, so it was a prime opportunity for the Red Sox to take the lead and try to hold on for the rest of the game. Especially with a rain delay almost certainly coming through within the next few innings.

Pedroia did a great job of staying in the at bat, fouling off multiple balls to try and drive a run home. But on a 79-mph curve from Charlie Morton on the inside edge of the plate, the home plate ump decided that the at-bat was over and called Pedroia out on a called third strike.

As you might have predicted if you read the headline of this post, Pedroia did not appreciate that call and immediately lit into the ump.

For anybody who missed it, the pitch in question was this one:

While you could call that a tossup as far as a ball or strike goes, Boston’s batters were already on edge based on a few other close calls in earlier innings and the fact that strike zones throughout the entire series have been consistently shifting in size from game to game — for both teams.

So while a charitable reading of the situation is that Pedroia was correct in his anger and shouldn’t have been out, it’s also true the Sox knew where the strike zone was by that point in the game and there are just some pitches you can’t look at go by if you know what the umpire has been calling.

It doesn’t really matter what the actually call should have been though, because the entertaining part of this little vignette was SUPER ANGRY John Farrell, red face and all. As a person from Massachusetts, angry Farrell is one of my favorite things because while it doesn’t happen too often. But when it does — he goes for it.

Now, it’s fair to expect that Pedroia would have gotten ejected here as well and that maybe it should have even happened before Farrell’s boot. But it’s the ALDS, and they’re in Boston, and it’s unremarkable that an umpire would want to give the players a bit more leeway than they do managers.

They both dropped a lot of swears, a real smorgasbord of profanity that the cameras picked up, and Farrell did the right thing by his veteran player by getting in the middle and sacrificing himself so his second baseman could stay in the game. Especially since Farrell might not be the Sox manager for much longer.

The Sox are going to have to get used to the expanded strike zone though because another reaction like this and there won’t be as much of an exception made for whichever player makes his opinion known.