Quote:
Originally Posted by jd1020
One has to define "ordinary effort" first. To me, and virtually everyone else on the planet besides you, Reynolds, and the dumbass ump that made the call seem to think an IFer going that deep into the OF to make a play is ordinary.
I don't expect MLB refs/reps to throw their colleague under the bus.
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And the ump in the Castro game, and the ump in other regular season games. Hell, they'll do that in softball games.
It
is ordinary. That ball gets hit in a roughly similar spot probably 10 times/day during the regular season and 90% of them get caught easily. It's not a difficult play for the IFer to make at all.
When they happen with any degree of regularity, they are by their definition 'ordinary' plays requiring 'ordinary effort' from the player in question.
Kozma was standing under a falling baseball with his feet under him and his arms out for the call. At that point, his position on the field was immaterial - he was an IFer that was going to catch the baseball using ordinary effort.
Done - IF fly is called.
The people that are mostly loudly criticizing this call are the idiots like Rosenthal that didn't actually
know the IF fly rule when they lost their shit (you are in the same boat, BTW). The folks that said "it's on the OF, how can it be an IF fly?" are just flat ignorant of the rules but they were so damn vehement in their objection that now they feel compelled to own it.
The guys that looked like idiots last night were not Sam Holbrook or Verducci, it was brain surgeons like Ripken and Rosenthal that didn't bother learning the rules before they started attacking them.
But go ahead, keep on defending a position you took born of ignorance. You're doing a fine job of it now that you're parsing out thousandths of a second when trying to determine if Holbrook got his had up 'immediately'.