The Great World Series Interference Debate - The New York Times

HOUSTON — Somewhere in the long night’s journey into baseball that is a World Series game I turned my back on the leather-lunged fans who hung over a rail behind me and screamed ceaselessly, and I peered at home plate and tried to remind myself who was batting, which team was ahead and if it was really possible this Game 6 had just come to a dead stop.

I was seated approximately 440 feet from home plate in what the Astros euphemistically call auxiliary press seating. At least two-thirds of the outfield remained out of view. This lent a suspenseful quality to the evening, as fly balls went up and up and then disappeared. We auxiliary-seat sorts would cup our ears and listen for the sound of applause or moans to signal what might have happened.

A couple of reporters broke out binoculars; I thought to myself that an interplanetary telescope would have been of greater use.

This obscure status quo held until the seventh inning rolled round and the game simply halted, lost in one of those Talmudic debates that enthrall hardball devotees and mystify everyone else. Trea Turner, a fleet-footed shortstop for the Nationals, had hit a dribbler in front of home plate and committed the crime of running out of the baseline as he raced toward first base. As he lunged for the bag, his leg knocked free the glove of the Astros’ first baseman, Yuli Gurriel, who was himself positioned awkwardly. The ball rolled away, and Turner took off for second.

The problem, now, was that an umpire said Turner had interfered with the throw and called him out. Sweet outrage bubbled. Turner hopped up and down, coaches yowled and soon enough the umpires had strapped on earmuff-style headphones and placed calls to the baseball video review center in New York City. The umpires tried to raise Joe Torre, the Hall of Famer who moonlights as chief baseball officer.

Their failure to find Torre registered as deeply perplexing, as he was sitting in a field box perhaps 15 yards away. With the delay stretching on, Turner began to point at Torre in the stands and say loudly: “He’s right here. Just ask him. Why is he hiding?”

Torre, a laconic sort, sounded mystified too. “I guess what they must have done is try to call me,” he said.

We’ll return to these cogitations, which would leave social media aflame late into the night as warring schools of baseball-rule-book ideologues took to hurling footnoted insults at each other.

This has been one of our odder World Series. Because the Nationals won Game 6 and knotted the Series, we have a Game 7 on Wednesday, which is the highest of high holy baseball days. Yet it feels more strange than apt. Save for the first game, a 5-4 win for the Nationals, the Series has largely been bleached clean of suspense, with an average margin of victory of 5.1 runs.

The Nationals won the first two games on the Astros’ home turf, then the Astros returned the favor, taking three straight from the Nationals in Washington.

Then there’s the fact that much of the series has been played in the shadow of overlapping controversies. Early on, there was the Houston Astros assistant general manager, Brandon Taubman, who chose the occasion of the Astros’ pennant-winning victory over the Yankees to pull a cigar out of his mouth and bellow foul idiocies at three female reporters about the charms of the team’s closer, Roberto Osuna, who had beaten his girlfriend about in Canada. A Sports Illustrated reporter wrote an accurate account of his crudity, and the Astros’ response became a study in crisis P.R. gone whack. They released a snotty and thoroughly inaccurate claim that Sports Illustrated had peddled false news. Several iterations of walk-back occurred before Astros management was left sitting in a puddle of abject apology.

Then they fired Taubman.

In Game 5 in Washington, attention was diverted away from the field again. President Trump turned up and got booed and two models popped up behind home plate, pulled up their shirts and bared their breasts as Houston’s Gerrit Cole peered in at his catcher for a sign. If it’s not clear that Cole noticed, it’s clear that many fans did.

That set the stage for Game 6, which was a taut affair for six innings. There were home runs and sweet fielding plays and spectacular pitching by Stephen Strasburg, who varied speed and location and was masterful. It’s worth recalling that baseball tough guys got exercised back in 2012, when he returned from elbow surgery and the Nationals shut him down before the playoffs rather than insist he push his surgically repaired elbow.

“You’re pampering this kid,” they moaned. Strasburg has become one of baseball’s best postseason pitchers, 6-2 with a 1.46 E.R.A. in nine games, tossing 71 strikeouts in 55⅓ innings. Contrast that with the sad tale of Matt Harvey, who was persuaded to pitch way beyond agreed innings limits in the Mets’ 2015 playoff push and has never been the same.

I apologize. I’m talking baseball when I could be talking baseball delay. The did-Trea-Turner-interfere-or-not debate dragged on, and you wondered if in the replay center panicked M.L.B. sorts were ready to flip a coin.

Finally the umpires announced that Turner was out. That led Dave Martinez, the Nationals’ manager, to do his best raging bull imitation and get tossed out of the game, although not before his third baseman, Anthony Rendon, had rocket-launched a home run and put a spike in the Astros’ hopes of celebrating this night.

By that point my thoroughly soused friends in center field were reduced to hoarse croakings. “If there is justice in the world, c’mon, Springer, hit a homer!” one moaned.

George Springer did not hit a home run, and I bid my friends good night.

A little later, I listened as Astros Manager A.J. Hinch tried to sort out what happened in that seventh inning. He shrugged. “It took a really long time,” he noted, “for nothing to happen.”

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