Last night's game was pretty terrible. Matt Boyd gave up seven runs in the first before recording an out in the first. He never got that out because Gibby came to put him out of his misery. (FYI  to the SOSH dude. Boyd wasn't shelled by the Rangers. What you witnessed last night was a shelling.)

The Jays attempted to climb back into it because Wade Miley is both a lefty and also not that good. 

But it was a loss.

Now, I'm not that mad about the loss. Even with the loss, the Jays held ground and even with the win, the Sox are still pretty terrible. There is lots of baseball left and the Jays are right in the thick of it. It's a month before the trade deadline. Get some help, and this is definitely still something.

I'm pretty Zen. 

I'm willing to accept that the Jays "deserved" to lose that game. They didn't pitch well and didn't get the timely hits that were required (as evidenced by the small village left on base.) 

However, I'm not that Zen about what happened in the bottom of the 5th inning. 

Watching the replay, I think Valencia dragged his hand over the top of the plate, though it's completely possible that he didn't. And I'm willing to accept that the umpire didn't think he touched the top of the plate and the replay made it impossible to definitively tell.

There is no doubt that there was no tag. The early out call meant that Valencia didn't try to touch the plate again. And the fact that Miley was very animated while telling Hannigan to tag Valencia again tells me there was no initial tag.

And I would argue that the catcher was blocking the plate with his leg and that he started moving over that way before he had possession of the ball, despite all the Red Sox fans on Twitter trying to explain to me the myriad ways that that was a legal block. It wasn't. His leg was across the plate before he had the ball.

Hannigan doesn't move his leg that much once he has the ball.

Somehow Danny Valencia was ruled out on this play? pic.twitter.com/fziStVfAWd

— Ian Hunter (@BlueJayHunter) July 3, 2015

There were several things that pointed to the ump having made the wrong call, and the fact that the replay call failed to correct it was egregious. But I didn't realize just how egregious.

It took Twitter about seven minutes to chime in with definitive proof at how bad this call was.

Clever people on Twitter started combing through the rules and found one that refers to this exact scenario.

Does seem clear eh? pic.twitter.com/W2TGa6T4iU

— James G (@james_in_to) July 3, 2015

That pretty much describes this situation exactly.

Blue Jays Plus did a fantastic job illustrating how terrible this call was.   Ian Hunter provided great GIFs with several angles on this play. 


Ian also provided this

Sad Danny Valencia. pic.twitter.com/hXpcuLIcCS

— Ian Hunter (@BlueJayHunter) July 3, 2015

That's Danny Valencia, sadly smelling bullshit.

Let's read the rule again:



The call should be safe. Safe. It's right there. I will accept that an umpire might not know the rule book inside and out, off the top of his head. But someone sitting in New York with the rule book in hand should. It should be a searchable document, in a database. And they should have several clever people who know this stuff or how to quickly find it.

And if there isn't someone in the office in New York whose job it is to know the rules, that's a problem. It took fans (whose job isn't to know the rules) under 10 minutes to find this rule. Several people, who should be experts, who are employed by MLB, should be able to find this rule. That's their job.

Why have the rule if they aren't going to enforce it? Why is there a group of people, employed by MLB, if they don't know the rules and aren't correcting bad calls? Why is there replay, if it isn't to fix calls like this?

Of course, it's completely impossible to know how this changed the game, other than it denied them a run.  I will say that it completely sucked the energy out of the building.

8-5 and one out in the fifth with two men on and the top of the order coming up. With this offence. Against that pitcher. I'm willing to bet that was the game right there. Any momentum was stopped in its tracks.

The game itself was a complete write off. A village was left on base. The pitching was scary. The Jays didn't lose any ground in the playoff race. In the grand scheme of things, this loss isn't that big a deal because it's baseball.

But I'm not all that casual about what happened in the bottom of the fifth.