From the standpoint of the San Francisco Giants, yesterday’s game was as “foul” as they come.
Phil Cuzzi calling Travis Ishikawa out at home on a play that would have ended the game cost the Giants a win and it’s all anyone can talk about.
It was a play that everyone in the ballpark thought was the game winner for the Giants, even Mets catcher Henry Blanco .
Jason Adamowicz did a great job recapping the ninth inning in his recent blog post for Mets Gazette (click here to read ) and according to Kevin Kernan of the NY Post , Cuzzi explained his call by saying:
It was a bad throw, but it looked to me like when he slid in, I didn’t think that his foot was down. I know his leg was across the plate, but I didn’t think it was down.
Here is where I’m going to try and cure a bad case of the Monday’s with a little humor and ask “is there ANY chance Phil Cuzzi was right?”
Short answer is no, but the long answer involves what I think is actually a pretty decent explanation for what looked to be one of the worst calls I had ever seen (it might have been the worst had Jim Joyce not taken that honor by robbing Armando Galarraga of his perfect game earlier this season).
Maybe I just got used to the “no explanation policy” of the World Cup and am now a pushover for any attempt at justification, or maybe there is at least some shred of validity to what Cuzzi thinks he saw.
The home plate ump states that he saw Ishikawa’s leg come cross home but did not think it was actually touching the plate (by the way there’s great video footage of this on mlb.com, click here to see).
In watching the replay, the Giant’s first baseman did have his foot hit before the plate which caused his leg to pop up a little bit.
After that his leg apparently slid across home plate, while his back leg trailed and Henry Blanco applied the tag.
If Cuzzi, with his eagle eye vision, thinks that…TO READ THE REST OF THIS POST AND OTHERS LIKE IT HEAD TO METSZILLA.COM BY CLICKING HERE:
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