Is Major League Baseball ready for ABS? We can safely assume that Los Angeles Dodgers announcers Joe Davis and Eric Karros would answer that question with a resounding yes.
After striking out Bryce Johnson and Martín Maldonado on three pitches each to start the top of the third inning in Thursday night’s game against the San Diego Padres, Dodgers Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s first two pitches to Fernando Tatís Jr. were strikes. That left Yamamoto one pitch away from an immaculate inning. To all but one person watching the game, Yamamoto’s 0-2 offering was a strike. Unfortunately for Yamamoto and the Dodgers, the one person who disagreed was home plate umpire Marvin Hudson, who called the pitch a ball.
“Oh, no,” exclaimed Davis, calling the game for the Dodgers on Spectrum SportsNet LA. “Marvin Hudson cost him an immaculate inning.”
“I mean, that’s not even close,” Karros added. “That is. Wow. That wasn’t even borderline or anything. That was borderline middle-middle.”
“Can we get ABS on loan for the night from Triple-A?” Davis asked. “That’s a bummer.”
In the interest of fairness, we also wanted to know what Don Orsillo and Tony Gwynn Jr., calling the game for the Padres, thought of the call.
Pretty much the same.
“That could have been an immaculate inning had that been called a strike,” Orsillo said. “And guess what? It was really a strike.”
“That’s gonna go viral,” added Gwynn.
“Maybe Marvin Hudson didn’t want to see an immaculate inning,” Orsillo speculated.
“I honestly expected to turn and look at the screen and see the ball above,” Gwynn added. “Not in the middle.”
“No. Middle-middle,” Orsillo noted.
Now, as we all saw, this was a relatively inconsequential missed call, at least as it relates to the game’s outcome. The mistake forced Yamamoto to throw only two more pitches before he ultimately struck Tatis out anyway. We’ve seen more costly missed calls. So, what’s the big deal?
For one, immaculate innings are rare. There have only been 118 thrown in MLB history. And while that may not seem too rare, for perspective, there have been nearly three times (326) as many no-hitters thrown.
More notable, though, is that this was not close. If anything, Yamamoto’s 0-2 pitch to a dangerous hitter like Tatis caught too much of the strike zone, even when considering that he was vying for an immaculate inning. As both Karros and Orsillo said, it was closer to middle-middle than off the strike zone. There also wasn’t an issue like something (or someone) getting in Hudson’s way or a bad frame job from catcher Will Smith. Humans are going to make mistakes from time to time. But this was a big one, and it came from an umpire with more than 25 years of MLB experience.
So, the frank criticism from both broadcast booths was well earned.