Get the woo out of here.
During 2018, Rockies manager Bud Black had made two dozen previous challenges of a call made by the umpiring crew on the field. But with his 25th challenge of the season Wednesday night, Black demonstrated the real reason instant replay was invented for use in the major leagues.
Right there, in living color on the humongous video board in , replay busted a Houston fan among the orange-clad, Ric Flair-wooing fools that invaded our ballpark. This yahoo was busted for reaching over the left-field fence and clumsily interfering with Colorado outfielder .
And replay proved conclusively what many of us have suspected: Front-running Astros fans don’t even know how to catch a baseball, much less how to act at a big-league game.
The majors adopted the current, extensive replay system four years ago, but I must admit a get-off-my-lawn grumpiness for the widespread use of this technology until the top of the sixth inning on a damp summer evening. Leading off the inning, Astros third baseman Alex Bregman smacked a pitch from Colorado’s toward the bleachers in left field. The ball, however, died at the wall, with Parra camped out on the warning track, posed to turn the danger into a long out.
But instead of making the catch, Parra flinched and the ball bounced off his left shoulder. Bregman motored all the way to third base, putting himself in position to extend Houston’s 2-1 lead.
And thatap when Black hopped off the front step of the Colorado dugout, asking the umpire crew to take a look at what happened. Did he know immediately what happened?
“That’s 380 feet away. It’s dark. I’m 61 years old and my eyesight’s not there. How am I going to see it?” said Black, giving full credit to Brian Jones, the video coordinator that monitors every second of every game for possible replay challenges.
What happened is a man wearing an Astros jersey had reached over the fence with a glove. For a moment, letap shelve the debate whether any self-respecting fan over the age of 12 should be caught with a mitt at a major-league game. But if you’re going to wear a glove in public, you should at least know how to operate it.
And Astros Fan made the worst play on a ball by somebody wearing an orange jersey in Denver since the last time Isaiah McKenzie muffed a punt for the Broncos. Without the deflection off the fan’s glove, there would have been no triple by Bregman.
The keen eyes of Jones caught the error. Replay overturned the mistake. Justice was served. The offending Houston fan was politely escorted away from his seat by an usher. Bregman was not pleased.
I’m not very good at reading lips, but Bregman reacted to the decision to erase his triple by shouting: “Well, thatap fabulous.”
Or perhaps he uttered words a wee bit saltier.
And, upon further review, Bregman certainly minced no words expressing his disapproval of the umps’ interpretation of what was revealed by replay. “It was a … joke,” Bregman told The Houston Chronicle, which deleted a spicy word or two for consumption of readers at the breakfast table. “And they should be … ashamed of themselves.”
Isn’t that the beauty of replay? Justice is in the eye of the beholder. Oh, well. Everybody except the Astros fans went home from LoDo happy. smashed a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth to give Colorado a 3-2 victory, ending two wild-and-crazy nights of baseball in a football town.
Woo!
Don’t get me wrong. I like Texans. If not for Texans, who would be so kind as to subsidize our Colorado ski resorts by paying full price for a lift ticket at the window?
But allow me to offer a friendly piece of advice: For the past two evenings, there was a plague of Astros fans, many of whom didn’t know George Springer from Jerry Springer until last October, who swarmed our ballpark in LoDo wearing orange jerseys.
Hey, y’all. The only orange welcome at an athletic stadium in these parts is Broncos orange.
Don’t mess with us on this, Texas.
