Happy Jerry Meals Day
Posted: Sat Jul 27, 2024 10:07 am
In the early morning hours of this date in 2011 a 19-inning game that began the night before ended as Mike McKenry swept a tag across Julio Lugo's thigh, but somehow the indirectness of the sweeping motion fooled umpire Jerry Meals into thinking the tag was missed.
The blown call wasn't the worst ever (despite the title of the video embedded below), but it widely mocked and reviled, making it onto the national news, and is now considered to be the straw that broke the camel's back — the blown call that tipped the opinion of the lords of baseball to embrace instant replay, perhaps not so much for the integrity of the game but to insulate it against similar future ridicule.
Ironies abound. The first is that while video evidence suggests the sweeping tag did indeed lead to contact between the glove and the runner's thigh, the evidence isn't so clear and convincing as all that, despite what Diane Sawyer says, and the call might well not be overturned under the current system.
The second irony is that this play takes place before the Buster Posey reforms were instituted, and there's nothing stop McKenry from burying the tag into Lugo's crotch and halting the slide with his shinguards, but he gives it the Olé! treatment. He's certainly in position — the kind of position that used to justify any call of "out" no matter how ambiguous the tag contact, under the logic that "the throw beat the runner."
But safe the runner was. Meals went on to umpire through the 2022 season, but as you might guess, he and his family were broadly harassed over this call, Joe Torre kind of threw him under the bus, and instant replay was on its way.
The blown call wasn't the worst ever (despite the title of the video embedded below), but it widely mocked and reviled, making it onto the national news, and is now considered to be the straw that broke the camel's back — the blown call that tipped the opinion of the lords of baseball to embrace instant replay, perhaps not so much for the integrity of the game but to insulate it against similar future ridicule.
Ironies abound. The first is that while video evidence suggests the sweeping tag did indeed lead to contact between the glove and the runner's thigh, the evidence isn't so clear and convincing as all that, despite what Diane Sawyer says, and the call might well not be overturned under the current system.
The second irony is that this play takes place before the Buster Posey reforms were instituted, and there's nothing stop McKenry from burying the tag into Lugo's crotch and halting the slide with his shinguards, but he gives it the Olé! treatment. He's certainly in position — the kind of position that used to justify any call of "out" no matter how ambiguous the tag contact, under the logic that "the throw beat the runner."
But safe the runner was. Meals went on to umpire through the 2022 season, but as you might guess, he and his family were broadly harassed over this call, Joe Torre kind of threw him under the bus, and instant replay was on its way.