My belief isn’t that we need more instant replay in baseball because umpire’s are incompetent. My belief is that it’s needed because a lot of things happen in baseball that are way too tough to call at normal speed.
This, however, was not one of those plays.
In the eighth inning of Sunday’s ALCS Game 2, second base ump Jeff Nelson ruled Omar Infante safe here.
Infante was trying to make it back to second after rounding the bag too far on a single. He obviously failed. It should have been the third out of the inning. Instead, he and one more baserunner came around to score in the frame, upping the Tigers’ lead from one run to three.
Now, the Yankees didn’t lose today because of Jeff Nelson. They lost because they couldn’t hit. And while it was a horrendous call, the play only arose because of Infante’s sloppy play. The Yankees were robbed of an out, but they gave up the two runs because they allowed hits to four straight batters.
Regardless, Nelson’s call was bad enough that it’d be justified to bench him for the rest of the postseason, if MLB did things like that. Since it doesn’t, he’ll be right back out there on Tuesday.
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Here’s the video:
