Thursday night, Mike Redmond sorta lost his mind.
I'd love to show you the video, but we don't have that ability yet. Coming soon, I believe! Here's the link, though.
The big problem is that the review takes so long. The people in New York doing this work really need to get better at this. There are two or maybe three relevant replay angles, and they shouldn't each have to be seen more than a couple of times. So this shouldn't take six minutes.
I happen to think the people in New York got it right. The catcher is clearly blocking the plate without the ball, and there's no way to reasonably argue that he had to block the plate to catch the ball, which was coming from right field. The catcher just blew it. I don't know, maybe he didn't get the memo. You have to give the runner some plate, and Jeff Mathis didn't. Lesson learned, problem.
But Redmond seemed to think because he's been in the game for a long time, he simply must be right. "Like I said I played this game for so long," he said, among many other things he said. "I've given this game everything I've had as a player and a manager. What a joke. What a fucking joke. That's ridiculous."
The problem with such an appeal to authority is that it blows up the second another authority disagrees. Which Chris Welsh, up in the broadcast booth, did. Welsh pitched in the major leagues, and has been around professional baseball for many decades now. Granted, Welsh works for the Reds so he's hardly objective. But then, Mike Redmond's hardly objective, either.
So Redmond's "it's an absolute joke" carries exactly as much objective weight as Welsh's "it's a no-brainer" on the other side of the argument.
Mathis had plenty of time to make the play properly. If he didn't, the blame lies not with Redmond's despised "guys in New York," but rather with Mathis himself. With maybe a little left over for his manager, who's had plenty of time to teach the proper play.
