Terrible call?
No doubt.
Tragedy?
Hardly.
Who can fix it?
I guess Selig, maybe the official scorer and maybe an executive order from the President. Note: Don’t you guys have something else to do, I don’t know, world peace or something.
Can we find some good out of it?
Certainly, from the way Joyce has stood up from the start to the way Galarraga accepted the apology there are plenty of life lessons here.
Will Galarraga feel like he was robbed for his entire life?
I don’t know, let’s ask him when he stops to gas up that brand new Corvette.
But as Tiger fans the question we should ask ourselves is what would Ernie say?
Most of us learned to love baseball by listening to Ernie and never again will anyone touch our hearts and souls while describing a game like Ernie. He always knew the proper perspective to put on all things baseball and if there is anything this needs is some perspective.
So what would he say?
Would it be a long diatribe about how tough the umpires have it?
Ernie was always sympathetic of the tough job they had, maybe the only analyst who ever made the umpires part of the game without all the criticism. He was loved by the umps and a great friend with many of them. But no, this isn’t the time to talk about the trials and trivials of being an umpire.
Would it be about what a shame it was that Galarraga won’t be remembered for a perfect game?
Sure, Ernie would tell the story, no one has ever passed the lore of baseball down to the next generations like Ernie and I wish we could have heard him tell this story someday. But not today, this was history and history is best told when it’s actually history and not fresh in our minds.
Maybe he would use it to cry out for instant replay or how the human element was part of the game.
I don’t know what Ernie’s opinion of instant replay was, he was old school but never stuck in the past. Probably would have liked it, anything that makes the game better was fine by him. But Ernie never used his position for a soapbox, he was there to inform us, not to persuade us,
No, I don’t think it would have been any of those things.
You see, Ernie was a wordsmith, always able to explain everything you needed to know without all the noise that passes for analysis these days. When Ernie explained it you understood it and it didn’t take charts and graphs.
Ernie would have loved the reaction by the fans and the class that everybody involved had when Galarraga brought out the line-up card to home plate umpire Joyce. But he would have described it with a minimum of words, he always assumed the listener followed baseball so no reason to set the stage.
I only hope we made Ernie proud with the fan reaction, I’m sure he pointed it out to everybody in heaven.
But no, Ernie would have said any of that stuff today.
Ernie would have put the perfect answer to the question and an answer we all should remember. Simply put, Ernie would have said, “That’s baseball.”
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