ATLANTA — The Braves and the Cardinals will start their National League division series on Thursday, and just about all the two teams — and baseball officials — can hope for is that the matchup will avoid the chaos and controversy of their last playoff meeting.
It was 2012, the inaugural edition of baseball’s wild-card games. The Braves had won 94 games. St. Louis, the defending World Series champion, arrived at Atlanta’s Turner Field with 88 victories.
Atlanta, which would finish the day with a dozen hits, scored two runs early. The Cardinals chiseled away at that lead and built their own as Atlanta’s defense struggled with errors. When the eighth inning arrived, St. Louis was up, 6-3.
Then came a seemingly routine pop fly, a disputed call, a storm of debris, a 19-minute delay and a rare game played under protest — a sequence that still draws bewildered chuckles in St. Louis and glowers and disgust in Atlanta.
And when the Braves and Cardinals face off again this week, Sam Holbrook, whose raised right arm invoked the infield fly rule and instantly turned him into the target of a city’s scorn, will be the crew chief for the series.
The interviews in this article, conducted separately over the last week, have been edited for length and clarity. Major League Baseball declined to make Holbrook or Joe Torre, the executive who rejected a protest related to the game, available for interviews; their remarks were made during a news conference in 2012.
Mitchell Boggs, St. Louis reliever: It really goes back to the beginning of the game.
I’m from an hour north of Atlanta, so I grew up a huge Braves fan. It was Chipper Jones’s last season, and so much had been made about that. So the Braves’ fan base for that game — that was the craziest environment I had ever been in, or ever was in, in the big leagues.
I walked Freddie Freeman to start the eighth inning, and then immediately got a double play ball from Dan Uggla. It should have been a double play, but it kind of got away from Pete Kozma. We were able to get Freddie.
Then David Ross jumps on me on the first pitch and gets a base hit.
Atlanta had runners at first and second with one out, with the Cardinals leading, 6-3. Andrelton Simmons came to the plate.
Boggs: He was a right-hander, and those were the guys I wanted to face. My only thought process was, “Just get another ground ball, get a double play.” At that point, it’s just about getting out of the inning as quickly as possible.
When he popped it up, I was thrilled because in my mind that is a routine out. In the big leagues, when a ball like that goes up in the air, that is an out because you’re talking about the best in the world at what they do. Pop-ups are outs. In my mind, there’s two outs in the bottom of the eighth, let’s get the next guy and go to the ninth.
Dan Uggla, Atlanta second baseman: I checked where Matt Holliday was playing in left, and that’s a tough ball for any shortstop to get. It’s a complete in-betweener.
I had a feeling it was going to drop when it went up.
Boggs: It never popped into my mind that it wasn’t going to be caught.
Fredi Gonzalez, Braves manager: The ball goes up in the air, and I see the shortstop going back and going back and going back, and it dropped like 10 feet from Matt Holliday, and the umpire called the infield fly rule.
(From 2012) Sam Holbrook, left-field umpire: I saw the shortstop go back and get underneath the ball where he would have had ordinary effort and would have caught the baseball, and that’s why I called the infield fly.
Uggla: He obviously saw it from a different angle. He made the best call that he could make right there. It doesn’t matter what I think.
Boggs: The ball goes to the ground. I was thinking I was in control of the moment, and suddenly I’ve got the bases loaded and one out. And Matt Carpenter walks up to me from third and says, “We’re all good, man.” I’m thinking, “You don’t have to console me,” and he says: “No, they’re going to call him out. They’re going to call the infield fly rule. I can hear them talking.”
From the moment they called him out, it didn’t take more than a few seconds for the entire field to be covered with cups and bottles and trash. I was in the mode of, just give me the ball and let me keep pitching. But I realized that was not going to be possible because there was trash from 40,000 people all over the field.
Gonzalez: I remember going out there and going berserk, and Jeff Kellogg was the home plate umpire. And Jeff is like: “Fredi, I don’t want to throw you out of the game. I don’t want to throw you out of the game.” It was just crazy, and I remember the fans getting crazy, and Atlanta is not a place where they usually get crazy like that.
Boggs: They were upset. If you think I’m going to say a bad word about them, you’re crazy because I probably know a lot of the people who were throwing stuff. If something like that happened at a Georgia Bulldogs football game, heck, I’d probably throw something, too.
The delay was 15 to 20 minutes.
Gonzalez: I went back in the dugout and called Frank Wren, the general manager, and told him I was going to protest it. He said, “Go ahead, do it, and we’ll figure it out later.”
Boggs: When that much is on the line, I think you want your manager to do everything he possibly can. I would have been shocked if Fredi didn’t protest it.
Play eventually resumed. Uggla and Ross had advanced to scoring position, running at their own risk. But the batter was out, because of the rule, and now there were two outs.
Uggla: It definitely takes a little bit of the wind out of the sail. We still had guys on base, still had the opportunity, still had an inning or two left. If you only had one out, you have a chance for a sacrifice fly.
Boggs: It was just: Get this game over with. We didn’t even go out and shake hands. We just immediately went into the clubhouse. The place, even after the play was over, was a zoo.
Gonzalez: It killed us. It would have been bases loaded, one out. Now, we don’t know that we would have scored three or four, but I’d take my chances with bases loaded and one out.
Someone once told me it was the furthest out a ball ever landed that was called for the infield fly rule.
Boggs: I obviously knew that for the infield fly rule to go into effect, it didn’t have to be on the infield. I thought the rule, as it was written, applied there. I obviously understand looking back on it that it looked questionable, but in my mind, they got it right. And I was thrilled to see them call it.
Holbrook: It’s all judged on what the fielder does. Once that fielder establishes himself and he has ordinary effort on the ball, that’s when the call is made.
(From 2012) Joe Torre, executive vice president for baseball operations for M.L.B.: I talked to Frank Wren, and I talked to Fredi after the game. I spoke to them, asked them what they were basing their protest on, and I ruled basically to disallow the protest based on the fact that it was the umpire’s judgment call.
Gonzalez: At least I filed the protest.
Uggla: We came up short, and that play, had it gone our way, you never know.
Boggs: They were a very good team, and we knew going in there that it was going to be a fight and they were going to be charged up. We knew we had a good team, and we were used to those situations.
It was just a crazy thing that happened.
Gonzalez: Hey, thanks for ruining my day.
Alan Blinder reported from Atlanta, and David Waldstein from New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/sports/braves-cardinals-baseball-playoff.html
2019-10-03 07:00:00Z
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