There are a couple amusing things that happened in the world of baseball today.
1) Jim Leyland, the manager of the Tigers, was having a heated argument with an umpire when 'God Bless America' started playing over the stadium speakers. He immediately stopped arguing, took off his hat and put it over his chest, and bowed his head a bit until the song was over. Then, he went back to the umpire, resumed his vehement argument, and got kicked out of the game. Awesome!
2) This one was actually partly annoying because the afflicted pitcher is on my fantasy team. In the game between the Blue Jays and the Red Sox, Alex Cora (of the Sox) hit a fly ball off of Roy Halladay. Outfielder Alex Rios drifts towards the ball, lollygagging the whole way, and the ball pops out of his glove, hits his other hand, and ricochets into the stands for a two-run homerun. He wasn't even on the warning track---the ball went 7-8 feet off his hand. As Orel Hershiser correctly pointed out on baseball tonight, this should be ruled a four-base error rather than a homerun. Rios was lollygagging! (In a related---but significantly funnier---incident, a ball bounced off Jose Canseco's head for a homerun in 1993.)
Wouldn't that be a 5-7 base error, counting the other guy who scored?
ReplyDeleteYou like the word lollygagging, don't you? :-)
There is a way of counting in which that makes sense, but the tradition in the case of an error causing somebody to reach base is to count how many bases that person got. Errors can also be assigned to the advancement of runners (say, a single and an error if a batter gets to second base on an overthrow). That, of course, is convention. The one error explains all the runner advancement in the case I cited. The way the runner already on base would get incorporated is that both that run (and the one from the homerun) would be considered "unearned" (so it doesn't hurt a pitcher's ERA, which is their "earned run average") unless something happens afterwards that would have allowed the runner to score anyway (in which case, only one run would be unearned).
ReplyDeleteThis needs to be done by a professor in a math class: "You lollygag when taking derivatives! You lollygag when doing curve fitting! You lollygag when computing quadratures! Do you know what that makes you?"