wat happened

The obstruction call was correct... Intentional or not when he raised his legs it was donezo.

The balls and strikes were pretty goddam questionable + frustrating the whole game. At least the calling there was shit for both teams' pitchers.

That shit was driving me crazy.

There was no way for middlebrooks to "try and get out of the way quickly" as the umpires said his best bet was in the postgame press interview. Do you seriously expect someone to be able to crawl roughly 5 feet in less than a second? And if he just lay there, not even counting the legs bit, he'd still get called for obstruction. And since it was an judgement-based call, ANY movement he made could have been construed as obstruction since "hurr durr the baserunner determines his own baseline."

MLB needs to fire Jim Joyce and seriously give their rulebook a good poring over before the 2014 season.

See that's just you being mad :p

Obstruction VERY RARELY comes into play - the only reason it did here is because he was attempting to advance a base and was prevented from doing so. In *most* cases obstruction is just let go because it doesn't *really* effect anything - examples are like when a bat hits the catcher's mitt, a runner taps a fielder, a batter fails to immediately get out of the way of the catcher who wants to throw, or a first basemen's leg slightly blocks a runner sliding back into first. Had he laid still it'd probably have been alright, especially given that Craig could barely run anyhow especially after sliding into third, getting up, and being hit by the throw from home lol. It looked like he was going to be able to clear him until his legs came up and tripped him - I imagine Middlebrooks assumed Craig was just going to stay at third being as he couldn't really run and didn't appear to have a particularly good slide into third and so he attempted to get up without paying any attention to what was going on. Had he not made any motion that blocked craig, and they still wanted to call obstruction since he was laying directly in the base path, they could have called a "minor" obstruction - which would have just called the ball dead and the umpires would have decided where the runner-batter would end up (first or second).

That particular call is just rare and sad because of how arbitrary it feels, but it was the right one and was made by the third base umpire *not* the home plate umpire who signaled that he deferred to the third base ump. The balls and strikes though - if you wanted to say those were shit I would totally agree lol. The pitching performances were pretty bad tonight in general - nobody pitched like they had any confidence whatsoever (maybe by design), but it's hard to get ahead in the count when the strike zone is less of a square and more of a thin amoeba.

On the bright side for the bosox, it's only 2-1, which is totally surmountable, and the cards basically wrecked their bullpen tonight so the next few nights may be p-rocky lol.

>lying still would've led to a no call

Not according to the umps in the press conference and the mlb rulebook they read from

"After a fielder has made an attempt to field a ball and missed, he can no longer be in the

Yeah the obstruction rule is a judgement call in those cases - if they would've chosen to be absolute about it, then all Craig had to do was run towards the prone third baseman and he'd have gotten his run lol. That "likely" in there shows that the call is subjective, I've seen it go either way - the most often that it comes up is diving for balls as per the example and safe calls at second during attempted double plays where the runner (having tripped the defender) attempts to go to third.

The only thing I was ever specifically coached on was to get the hell out of the way as quickly as possible so you don't get spiked (because spikes will break the skin pretty easily lol).

At the end of the day it's just part of baseball, as soon as the throw went back to third I could hear my ol' coach humming rag-time because a cardinal rule of good defense is to never throw the ball back to where it just came from because it tends to go badly for you, as it did for the bosox lol.

yo fuck the red sox

That is a well written rule by the MLB to prevent any 'judgement' call situations...

The third baseman was in the way and the runner was obstructed by him. Pretty simple imo.

Perhaps your team should invest in a better catcher.

he raised his legs up backwards to try and block him. i don't understand how its even up for debate. as someone who hates both teams the call was correct.

Except that the umps invoked a rule with judgement call language to award the baserunner home....???

Perhaps you should invest in a hearing aid.

Also I'm not exactly sure how, in the approximately one second between when middlebrooks dove and when craig started running for home, middlebrooks was supposed to crawl at least four feet forward to try and get out of the baserunner's way

Exactly, but the rule states (quite fairly) that once the ball has past you, you are no longer fielding the ball. You either don't throw the ball (with Kozma on deck, why in the hell would you throw it) or you come off the bag rather than dive to stop the ball.

Eh, seemed pretty fair to me, moved a little bit for lefties but otherwise I see nothing really to complain about.