Late last night, I was monitoring the baseball via an electron-generated scoreboard, the Twitter machine, and Jon Miller's radio broadcast of the Giants-ChiSox affair.
So first I heard about a play at the plate on the radio, and then I saw this ...
... and then I waited, ever so patiently, for this ...
#SamsungReplay: Crew Chief initiates review of Rule 7.13 in 10th. Call confirmed, no violation, Jordan Danks out: http://t.co/fHayVdCK7X
— Samsung Replay (@MLBReplays) August 13, 2014
and so then I watched the play (alas, the clip's not embeddable). And yes, it would have been wonderfully ironic if Buster Posey had been cited for violating the Buster Posey Rule. But no, he did not violate the Buster Posey Rule. With all due respect to Phil Rogers, Posey did not block the plate at all.
Watch the clip. Freeze it at the 1:07 mark. Posey has just received the baseball, and still he's offering roughly half the plate to the runner. Which is exactly what he's supposed to do. At this point, he's now allowed to block the plate ... but still he doesn't shift his feet, and the runner veers farther afield not to miss a plate-blocking Posey, but in the vain hope of evading the tag.
This is just a good baseball play, exactly as Joe Torre designed it.
Everybody loves, just loves to complain about Rule 7.13, which to be sure has been imperfectly designed and applied. But four-plus months in, usually it works as it's supposed to. Just like this. At this point, the biggest problem with the rule is that it's appealed too often, adding too many minutes to too many games. Considering how rarely the calls are reversed, managers need to take a bigger hit for the appeals.
