A “Perfect” Day, Almost
By Scott Allen
The Arizona Diamondbacks continued their perfection, of losing on their road trip. A perfect 0-9 the Dbacks went from Colorado to San Francisco and to Los Angeles, where the Dbacks dropped their second consecutive 1-0 extra inning game to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
For the second day in a row, the Dbacks found quality starting pitching. A day after Dan Haren went eight innings and threw 126 pitches, giving up zero runs, Edwin Jackson on Wednesday went nine innings and gave up a goose egg as well. Unfortunately when your offense is struggling as much as the Dbacks is, there is little room for error from the bullpen when you reach extra innings, which has proven true the past two games.
Something eventually has to give. This team has become accustomed to losing and it shows. Now its almost expected the next shoe will drop and things will fall apart late in the game. Four consecutive walk-offs going back to Sunday have done the Dbacks in and those are harder to take than the 12-1 losses that were piling up previously. Now the Dbacks come home for the gauntlet of Colorado, Atlanta, and St. Louis before heading back out on the road for dates with Boston and Detroit.
Another almost perfect day in Detroit turned sour this evening when Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga had a perfect game taken away by umpire Jim Joyce, who blew an easy call at first base, costing the hurler his first perfect game and the majors third one this season. There are calls all over baseball and the sporting world, even from sportscasters, for the call to be overturned. I don’t agree that it should. In principal, I agree it was a blown call and I would love to see Galarraga get his perfect game, however, if you overturn the call, you are going to have either overturn every missed call that blew a game in the past, or you open Pandora’s Box and set a precedent for the future. You can’t do that.
There are also calls for replay to arrive now in grander fashion. Why? You are taking the human element away piece by piece. How do you determine when replay is going to be used? On every controversial call? You can’t. You simply can’t. Listen, Jim Joyce made a mistake and to his credit he manned up after the game and admitted error. Does it fix things? No. Not even close. He could have hid away from everyone though and not taken the heat. He even singled Galarraga out saying he was one of the only ones that didn’t say anything to him after the game. Joyce may have made the wrong call, but he has class. He should be reprimanded, but not fired. He made a mistake. Should we all be fired for making one mistake at work? Again, no. Give him a second chance. There is no trend of Jim Joyce making bad calls. You don’t spend 21 years as a Major League Baseball umpire by being a bad umpire. Let’s give the guy a break and applaud Galarraga for the perfect game we all know he threw but won’t get official credit for.
Scott Allen