It’s just as well the Mets’ game against Milwaukee got rained out last night; manager Bobby Valentine and his team could probably use a day away from this umpiring crew.
Valentine has been none too happy with this crew since the Brewer series started on Monday, and his displeasure culminated when he was ejected during their third straight defeat, a 4-2 loss Tuesday night which the Mets officially protested yesterday.
The protest centered around a play with one out in the home eighth inning when Jermaine Allensworth was caught in a rundown between second and third. Milwaukee’s Ron Belliard had just thrown the ball to pitcher David Weathers covering third when Allensworth slid to the ground, and Belliard leapt over him. But as Allensworth got up again, Belliard made contact with the runner.
Allensworth took two steps toward second base, where teammate Luis Lopez was now standing, and stopped. Valentine’s contention was that Allensworth stopped because, having felt contact, he assumed the umpire would call obstruction and the play was over. And according to Valentine – who got ejected while arguing the subject with first base umpire Terry Tata – it should’ve been over.
“I called [NL President] Len Coleman last night and spoke to him, and he had not heard anything or seen anything or been in touch with the umpires. He noted my call, and the purpose of it,” said GM Steve Phillips. “I spoke to him again today, and we’re going to submit a written protest and see if we can get a different ruling. I don’t know if we can or can’t, but we’re gonna go through the exercise.”
The Mets know their odds are slim, with so few protests upheld. George Brett’s pine-tar incident was a famous exception. But, considering the umpires wouldn’t even grant Valentine’s request for a protest Tuesday night, he wasn’t willing to guess at the odds of winning yesterday’s protest.
“I was in a position I couldn’t even get a phone call yesterday. How could anyone think I could figure out how a decision’ll go?” Valentine asked yesterday. “My right is that I can protest when I think a rule is being misinterpreted. That’s my job. If I thought a rule was being misinterpreted, and I didn’t protest, I wouldn’t be doing my job.”
And he contends this one was misinterpreted badly, saying that while the baseball rule book refers to obstruction as “impeding,” for years the operative deciding factor has been whether the player made contact.
“The written rule is impede. the playing rule is contact,” Valentine said. “When we drive on our highways and its posted 65, we don’t get pulled over for 68 because its understood that you can drive 68. The written rule said impede. But the playing rule for 100 years, is contact.”
It was just the latest in a long line of bones Valentine had to pick with this crew. On Monday he wasn’t happy when the umpires huddled over a Jeromy Burnitz double-play ball that they subsequently changed into a foul ball. And he thought they were inconsistent with the outside strike, squeezing Bobby Jones while they struck out looking five times.
And when Milwaukee manager Phil Garner accused pitcher Rick Reed of doctoring the ball, Tata and home plate umpire Paul Schrieber went out to check. All of which made it even more galling to Valentine that, not only wouldn’t Tata check with second base umpire Tom Hallion and third base umpire Bill Hohn Tuesday night to see if Belliard had obstructed Allensworth, they wouldn’t even honor his request and put the game under protest.
“The National League umpires do a tremendous job,” Valentine said. “[But] we just had a couple of situations here in the last couple nights where things happened very quickly and they got missed.”
