Holliday Never Touched the Plate

The New York Times today ran an article about the support that instant replay might have at the winter baseball meetings. The times cited several of this post-season’s questionable calls and even singled out the fact that Matt Holliday missed home plate (emphasis mine.)

The recent playoffs produced some fly balls that were or were not home runs, depending on the view of the umpire making the call. The National League one-game playoff was determined by Matt Holliday’s headfirst slide home on which replays showed he never touched the plate.

This is the first major print outlet that I’ve seen come out and state that Matt Holliday missed the plate. Perhaps this is the beginning of a swing in the tide of media opinion towards the view that McClelland blew the call at home, and that Holliday missed the plate. Its a small chink in the armor for the Rockies apologists since perhaps over a thousand newspapers ran stories following the game that said the replays were inconclusive. However, those thousand stories were primarily off the AP feed where the article filed the night of the game contained the “replays were inconclusive” description.

The bulk of the Times story today focuses on the fact that any discussion of replay at the meetings will be limited to “boundry” calls. So that means they’ll only plan on talking about replay as a way to see if a home run down the line was fair or foul, or if a deep fly was over the wall/line/fence/padding and thus a home run, or if it hit the wall/line/fence/padding and returned to the field as a live ball that was still in play. In fact the Holliday play was singled out as a play that would not be subject to review.

Now that this viewpoint is in print in the Times it will be interesting to see if any other media outlets review the play in a fresh light. I still think that an unbiased evaluation of the replays available will show that Holliday missed the plate. Perhaps others will reach that conclusion as well. Or better yet, maybe MLB will release the missing “reverse angle replay” that will give conclusive proof.

The Times requires a free registration to view the story, which only takes 30 seconds, so if you’d like to read the article just click here.

Tags: Other Media, Replay in Baseball //