Interesting fallout from the Bob Davidson-Mike Matheny double switch snafu

Derrick Goold has a followup report regarding Monday night’s screwed up double-switch in the Cardinals-Marlins game. Two things of note.

First, some nice accountability from the umps, as crew chief Jerry Layne said that it’s everyone’s responsibility to get the lineup card right in such situations. Nice accountability from Matheny too, who says that going forward that he will be crystal clear in his changes. After all, even though I don’t think he was in the wrong, he could probably have made it totally clear that he meant the five-position in he field being substituted, and not the five-spot in the order.

More interesting is this passage:

During its postgame show Fox Sports Midwest played audio of Davidson telling Guillen that he "(messed) it up.” The Cardinals sent an email to St. Louis-area radio stations Tuesday morning asking that they “refrain” playing that audio clip. A source provided the Post-Dispatch with the email. Sent by a club official, the note said the commissioner’s office required field conversations be cleared by Major League Baseball before airing.

Replaying audio of an umpire dropping an F-bomb apparently counts as a “rebroadcast, retransmission, or account” of a game. Who knew? I would think that such a thing is independently newsworthy as opposed to being someone trying to use MLB-sanctioned audio for unauthorized purposes or something, but I suppose we’ll let the copyright lawyers chime in on that one. My gut feeling, though, is that this is just another instance of a copyright holder claiming more rights than they actually hold.

I question whether any sports radio station would comply with that, though. Maybe if the audio had a longer shelf life than the Davidson stuff it’d be tested, but I guess now it’s run its course.