A manager (Washington's Dave Martinez) getting ejected after his team had just hit a home run to grab its biggest lead in almost a week.
That same manager also protesting a game over a call that he admitted later he knew he wasn't allowed to protest.
And the umpires delaying this game, thanks to that protest, for four and a half minutes, so they could jam on their replay headsets, apparently for the review of a non-reviewable call, while managers and players on both teams were trying to figure out what the heck was going on, which it turned out wasn't a review of that call after all.
He said that the home-plate ump, Sam Holbrook, made "the right call." No surprise there.
Torre also read (aloud) Rule 5.09(a)(11), which specifies that a hitter running to first base isn't allowed to run "to the left of the foul line" for the final 45 feet of that journey. But even though he read the whole text, Torre then said that wasn't what Holbrook actually called. Torre said Turner "did run to the fair side of the (runner's lane), but really the violation was when (Turner) kept Gurriel from being able to catch the ball at first base." Still confused? Hang on. There's more.
Torre said the fact that "Gurriel's glove even came off" when he and Turner made contact near the bag was a major factor in the call because Gurriel "wasn't doing anything but trying to catch the ball."
And when asked where Turner was supposed to go, considering there was a base out there he had to touch, Torre said: "If you notice, he was running inside the line toward fair territory, toward the grass. And he was coming from that angle. If he had been running in the (runner's lane), he'd have been coming from a different angle, and the first baseman may have had an easier chance catching the ball."
All right then. That cleared that up. Except no, it didn't. This was a play that almost swallowed this game alive for a few minutes, between the call itself, the anger it provoked from Martinez and his players, the protest that wasn't really a protest and the review that wasn't really a review. So even an hour later, Astros manager A.J. Hinch was asked about it and said: "I don't really understand it yet."
All he knew, Hinch deadpanned, is that "it took a really long time for nothing to happen."
The protest
Just when you thought this mess couldn't get any more confusing, there was a four-and-a-half-minute let's-go-to-the-headsets delay following the original call. That, it turned out, was because Martinez informed the umpires that the Nationals wanted to protest the game.
But later, Martinez confessed he knew before he protested that this wasn't even a protestable call.
"OK, so I know the rules," he said. "I know you can't protest a judgment call. I wanted him to just look at the play, and (give) like a rule check. We were told before the series started that we can ask for a rule check. But part of me just said, 'Hey, we'll protest the game. Just check the rules.' And they did that."
When asked what, specifically, he was protesting, Martinez had another confession.
"Honestly, nothing," he said, "because I knew that you couldn't. I mean, I wanted them to go look at the replay. Go look and just give me a rules check, that's all. They came back and honestly, that was it. I dropped it. Done. They went and checked. They spent a few minutes. I've done it before, knowing that you can't do anything about it. And then things escalated."
What mostly escalated, of course, was all the time it took to accomplish pretty much zilch. The call couldn't be challenged. The protest couldn't be upheld. But it still killed an absurd amount of time because you had umpires on their headsets, checking in with the replay umps in New York. And then those replay umps called Torre, who was in the ballpark, sitting right behind the dugout. And then Torre "tried to make some calls" from his box, he said, but "we couldn't do it" for reasons nobody was really clear on.
So eventually, Torre denied the protest himself and the game resumed. But even Torre admitted, "It should never be that long."
From the beginning, A.J. Hinch had a hard time comprehending all of this. In his clubhouse, people privately admitted the interference call probably never should have been made in the first place because it was the equivalent of giving Trea Turner a speeding ticket for driving 56 miles an hour in a 55-mph zone.
But once that call got made, it was everything that followed which really tried Hinch's patience. While the call was being sorted out, Hinch headed for the mound and brought in a new pitcher, Will Harris. Then Harris had to stand around and wait forever, while the Nationals argued, umpires huddled around their headsets and, to repeat Hinch's perfect quote, "it took a really long time for nothing to happen."
"I knew the rule, what he called an interference," Hinch said. "I knew they were very upset about it. It's not a reviewable call. You can't protest it. You can't really do anything. And yet they go to the headset."
As irritated as he was by that, Hinch still waited a full inning before he wandered out, in the eighth inning, to ask Holbrook what on earth was going on. So Holbrook and Cederstrom then walked over to confer with Torre, who hadn't spoken to them directly throughout this whole ordeal.
"I didn't know what they were doing," Hinch said. "And then the explanation for me was, they couldn't get ahold of people. They were like 10 feet away from me. If they would have just told me, I'd have walked over and told them."
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There is also some other crap about Martinez checking himself into a hospital for some heart thing, and the hoopla about Scherzer. If they win, get ready for an avalanche of everything they've had to endure to beat the big, bad Astros
