Video
Better angle of the Ty France flyout (courtesy of the MLB on Facebook).
Honestly, I'd argue it had already lost a lot of energy before it hit the wire, and was actually assisted by the spin generating forward movement pushing it to the track. Thoughts?
Honestly it probably would’ve never been a controversy in the first place if the stupid announcing crew hadn’t made an absurd argument about it being a home run. They did a terrible job and created a controversy where one didn’t need to exist.
Also whoever that guy on the fox desk is, he said nobody go over the rules of ball hitting the roof. You just can’t make things up in live national tv. Clearly the umps went over the ground rules with the manager. If you don’t know, just don’t say anything. Brewers players can hit the roof too
I’ll give credit to Adam Amin because he very quickly clarified what the ground rule was, but in an attempt to not make his moronic color commentators look like morons he then decided to play along a little bit
Wainwright was pissing me off lol. I THINK IT WOULDA GONE OUT! OMG! I THINK IT WAS A HOMER! OH WOW! Like man your colleague is actively trying to explain that there are rules for this situation lol
I think Wainwright being a Cardinal his entire career might have colored his perception a bit considering he was part of the Cardinal team that knocked out the Brewers in the NLCS back in 2011.
I don’t mind him on Foul Territory, but what works in a podcast format does not work during a live broadcast. Also, that hairpiece he wears in the booth is certainly a choice.
Yeah, they kept yelling that it was a home run, and I'm like WTF? It's either an out or a dead ball, depending on the ground rules. They're not going to just assume a home run. And I say that as someone who was rooting for the Padres.
Pierzynski and Wainwright weren't saying that it needed to be ruled a homerun. They were saying, just based on the flight path, that it would have been a homerun.
The words they kept saying were "that's a homerun," but their actual intent was that, based on how the ball was batted, it would have been a homerun.
After seeing the statcast data, I disagree with that take anyway, but some of those camera angles made it seem like it was hit way deeper than it actually was.
So I am French and still trying to understand the rules. Second time I hear about this controversy - can someone explain why they claim it should have been a home run?
If I’m being generous, my best guess is that one or more of the guys on the broadcast were thinking of Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay, which has different rules than Milwaukee, for when fair balls hit the roof. There are certain areas of that stadium where if the ball is hit into the roof, it’s a home run, but this isn’t a rule that applies to all stadiums.
TB is the only stadium with an automatic HR rule, the other six domed stadiums have the same ground rules as Milwaukee. The announcers even acknowledged that the umps explained this rule to them in the pregame ground rules meeting and still botched the call
I'll be honest, I just don't like the fact that a baseball can bounce off of something and be considered in play. Maybe its different for teams that play a lot of games in domes but in my eyes if anything interferes with the trajectory of a baseball that isn't a natural force like wind, it should just be a dead ball. Call it a foul ball or no pitch or whatever but i don't think it should be ruled in play. This opinion is obviously influenced by last night but i still don't see the logic
A baseball can hit a bird or a base (or an umpire if he's behind the infielder) and the ball is still in play. Minute Maid Park used to have a flagpole that was in play (Richie Sexson hit it once).
Because the announcers were speculating that it might have been a home run had it not touched the roof. The rules would never have called it a HR, it was simply reviewed to ensure it was in fair territory which then meant that the ball was live and it was an out. There was no situation that it would have been a HR, except in the announcers opinion. Also, I've seen a few breakdowns that the ball would have likely traveled to about 325' had it not hit the roof, and the fence there is 340', so it would have maybe made it to the warning track.
MLB ball parks have ground rules that umpires go over with each team to cover unique situations
This was more of a thing in previous eras when major league ball parks were much more unique in their dimensions and features (many older fans think back to those days as having a certain charm because each ball park had its own quirks)
As baseball became more professionalized an effort was made to standardize major league playing fields so many new stadiums were built with more strict standards.. still there are some older parks with unique features that are grand fathered in
In this case the Tampa Bay Rays play in a park where certain parts of the roof are considered a home run.. I believe the commentary team thought maybe the Brewers may have something similar.. they should have known better but since most parks are standardized now situations like this are extremely rare
The Brewers radio broadcast did exactly that. It was a big nothing burger on the radio. The tv broadcast really leaned into it and made it a huge ordeal.
In fairness, of all the broadcasts I would imagine Brewers radio would be the last to argue for it being a HR, no? They also know the park and the ground rules better.
Well sure, but these national guys really botched this whole thing, and didn’t let up.
Really pisses me off that this happened. Brewers just can’t seem to have a normal win in the post season. Now we gotta deal with this shit if we go onto win the series. Sure, it’s just one game, but we will never live it down.
It’s the exact reason I want to face the dodgers in the NLCS and beat them. If we end up going against the braves and go to the WS, all we’re gonna hear is “well you didn’t beat the dodgers”. It’s probably irrational, but I’m just so sick of seeing it. We have a legitimately good team, and all I see are posts/comments about how “lucky” we are.
You're not wrong about any of the 'chatter' that will inevitably occur in the scenarios you mention, but I implore you to work on developing a mindset that treats and processes these things like the useless noise they are.
People will always find things to downplay the achievements of others, it's not something that is going away anytime soon, regardless of circumstances. The only real solution lies in how you engage with it.
We got that a ton last year and it is just the most exhausting thing to have to read over and over again because people just want to see their narrative play out that's in their head
That's a big part of the reason why broadcasts should make sure they have commentators who know at least a tiny shit about fuck, which Wainwright and Pierzynski didn't seem to.
On the other end of a good hitter failing is great Brewers relief pitching buzzsaw. Same thing happened to Machado and Tatis. This is precisely what the Padres bullpen does to other teams too, just glad we were on the right side of it this time.
For sure, but several of our stars had horrible approaches to at bats. That’s not a MIL thing (though you guys are a good ass team), it’s a Padres thing.
You can’t be serious lol they handled Miz as well as anyone can hope to, fouled off a ton of pitches and got him out fairly early after putting a couple runs on him. They had solid approaches, it was just a very solid pitching performance from both teams.
Yea i agree. The same could be said for our hitters like Ortiz and Turang. They aren’t considered stars but they are some of our better hitters and they had some pretty awful ABs. Turang bunting on his first AB pissed me off lol.
I think he meant Tatis and Machados specific ABs late in the game. Staring at 2 strikes then flailing at ball 1. Both just guessed exactly wrong in pretty crucial ABs. It happens but still sucked to watch lol
Oh absolutely, their approach with Miz was great. I should’ve been more specific and said how they approached their at bats with RISP in the latter part of the game.
Jesus I thought we were better than this, we lose one playoff game and suddenly it’s all “our players are lost at the plate with boys swinging at nothing” like come on, it’s baseball, baseball is really hard and it doesn’t always go our way even against a good team. Fans talk like this all the time it’s really confusing.
Play more disciplined? They played great? They got on base 15 times and got Mis out after four innings? They're just facing absurdly good pitchers who are also trying as hard as they can.
This is baseball. You have to be able to recognize that they're trying as hard as they can. And because they don't get hits in a specific at-bat, doesn't mean they're at fault?
You can't just WILL yourself to getting a hit in an at-bat. Otherwise they would just get hits every time. It doesn't work that way. Actually imagine what it's like to be them.
Which is crazy cuz I played the show a little bit and it’s fucking impossible to bat lol. I don’t know how anyone scores in that game. Pitching is fun though
Brother what are you talking about? We were seeing the ball insanely well off the Cy Young front runner. How can you watch the first half of that game last night and think we have a team-wide problem with discipline at the plate?
Yeah the France fly ball stings, but leaving all those runners on prior with multiple chances to score is way worse. Plus, it was just a hell of a game. It was what playoff baseball is supposed to be.
It had an exit velocity of over 103 mph so he did smash it.. 49 degrees is just way out of the sweet spot for home runs that would have taken something very special for that ball to have carried all the way out (powerful wind gust or just the perfect atmospheric conditions)
Think they’ve got it as having been a dinger in only 1 out of 30 parks.. we all know which one
I can understand it. But at the same time, nobody should think what they saw from such a shit angle is more objective than the calculations for a 49 degree ball hit 105...
But then again, the US has proven that it doesn't care much for data or the truth.
objective than the calculations for a 49 degree ball hit 105
the objective truth tho is that of all the balls we have measured hit with those two variables, they have traveled a varying distance of around 70-80 feet.
why? why do they vary so much? and if so, can you accurately predict what the 30th ball hit with that same EV and LA would have traveled? i don't think you really can. we know it at least traveled 325 feet, which already puts it in the upper range of the observed values for balls hit with that same EV/LA.
and that's after hitting the roof, which some people think accelerated it and/or flattened out the arc to allow farther travel, but other people think it clearly slowed down/deflected downward.
if you know these calculations, can you please tell me exactly how far you think this ball would have traveled without hitting the roof? are you saying the 325 that it was caught at?
Watching it from this angle, the ball appears to have changed its angle significantly. I can’t tell you guaranteed if it would have traveled further before hitting it, but its angle appeared much sharper toward to stands after hitting the roof
We don’t even need to do all of the math just take the launch angle.
In 12 years of statcast there’s been like 10 home runs with a launch angle of 49 degrees.. yes it had a 105 mph exit velocity but the sweet spot for home runs is about 25-35 degrees 49 isn’t even close
Agreed. Seems like it really carried after the doink. But that has me thinking…if it doinked and proceeded to actually clear the wall, would it be a home run? Thats what “in play” means here right?
Also a dumb but easily convinced human here, at a minimum this should be childhood dirt lot rules, ball is dead because it hit the equivalent of tree branch, replay the pitch.
Baseball will (virtually) never have a do-over on a batted ball, because of the inherent imbalance between batter and pitcher. To do so would be reinstating a disadvantage to the batter who already overcame it by putting the ball in play in the first place.
This also lends credence to the idea that it wasn’t gonna go out. He didn’t adjust very far from where he was initially setting up before it hit the roof. It was most likely a textbook Stantonian blast.
This is actually where the bad luck was for the Padres. That roof is FAR from flat. France managed to hit the flat part of a beam and not the 90% of the roof that would have sent the ball scattering into a random direction
This is an example of how much sway announcers hold on perception. Wainwright and AJ have a combined 37 years of mlb experience and have seen thousands of those sky high fly balls, none of which ever leave the park. Inexplicably they still thought it was out.
Even further they thought the rule on a roof ball was that the umpires are supposed to guess if its a home run based on their perception of the trajectory and call it based on that.
which is what I’ve been trying to explain to Phillies fans all season.
The announcers lie to us about mistakes that aren’t really mistakes, they don’t know the rules, they lie about reasonable expectations of performance, the postgame show doubles down on these lies, and then everyone wakes up 3 years later realizing we just fired a manager who made the playoffs FOUR years in a row and never missed the playoffs.
This has never happened in MLB history and nobody cares. We are going to have our 6th manager in 11 years! During the third best era of our franchise
Why is the common thought here that everybody who thinks it would have been a HR can't think for themselves and was convinced by the announcers? Watching the play live, it's a very reasonable opinion to have reached . People are watching replays and looking at metrics in retrospect and acting like anybody who thought something differently in real time is a mindless sheep. Kind of silly
You know, that's fair! On the other hand I think fans who have been made aware of the launch angle and exit velocity of the ball and still treating it like it would have been out are being ridiculous
This has been a ground rule for Miller Park/AmFamClam since its construction btw. Every park has quirky rules like this. Green Monster is the same thing
I think it's fun to have the purely academic debate about what would have happened, while acknowledging that it should have zero bearing on the outcome of the game.
Unfortunately we lost the vertical video war years go. I’ve always hated it but it is especially bad for sports highlights. Those jomboy clips with the shitty cropping are unwatchable for me
So many people trying to claim the ball bounced off the railing right over Chourios head. I think some of the vertical energy gets redirected horizontally, plus spin.
It obviously does. Anyone who's ever played table tennis knows what an extreme effect spin can have on a ball when it strikes a surface. This angle is actually amazing in that it shows that effect in full force. Hitting the roof gave that ball a ton of horizontal momentum that it was otherwise losing due to the normal air resistance. Which is why 49 degree launch angle balls are only ever home runs when they get caught in a heavy wind.
That too, but the predominant effect has to be the difference in wind resistance. Even a theoretical pure-knuckleball-hit-ball with no spin whatosever would be heavily affected by the wind. Air resistance is determined by the relative velocity between the ball and the air it's moving through, and so it's a lot less when you're hitting it downwind. With air resistance increasing with differential velocity (I think it's a ... cubic relationship? but don't quote me on that) even a small wind can make a big difference as to how much horizontal velocity a ball loses in flight.
Never gonna know if it was a homerun or not.
Forget the angles and statcast bs.
The biggest argument for it not being a homerun is Chourios positioning.
He was playing the ball in almost the exact same spot even before it hit the roof.
That would a pretty big misplay if it was going out.
Still will never know.
One giveaway is France doesnt act like it’s out after he hits it. The hitters usually have an idea. He thinks it would go foul. But the argument of also, no wind factor, it’s hard to say what this should be, but rules are rules. It’s an out
France wasn't sure if it was staying fair, said as much in the locker room, but he was emphatic that if it stayed fair it was gone, said he back spun the shit out of it
Hitting the roof can be at an angle which in this case it was, it's not necessarily a straight up and down drop. Hitting the roof effects where the ball would have landed normally.
Baseball indoors is unnatural and a sin against whichever god you believe in. If you need a dome, you dont get a baseball team. I dont give a fuck about your kids, bud
How many postponed games did the Guardians have again this year? How many did the Brewers have? Idk about you but I bought tickets for a whole series at am fam this year weeks ahead of time and one of the games had a tornado warning. If I were n Cleveland I wouldn’t have got to see the game I paid for weeks ahead of time. Get a roof morans
Spin, wind, temperature and even the individual ball all play huge roles in the balls trajectory. Like the estimated range here is like from 335 - 410 or something like that.
I assume those tools don’t calculate the new trajectory after the ball makes contact with the roof. I don’t think anyone is arguing that the ball would have gone out. I think it’s a question of would it stay fair.
Yeah this angle lends me to believe with Statcast on this ultimately being a super high flyout on the edge of the track. That ball came screaming once it the roof, only makes me think what if it hit that sweet spot to go out of the park.
Commentary really did not lend itself into helping out with that.
Man at this point im over being annoyed about it. Imo it was going going gone but everyones a physicist or a statistician all of a sudden. Games over, game 2 is coming
From the reaction of the batter, originally thought foul or pop up. As the announcers started calling it, I moved toward home run. Apparently the math says not a home run. Either way, the rules have been in place and everyone could have know what to do. I’m a brewers fan all my life and never knew what would happen in this situation. Just wild.
It definitely did not gain distance from being deflected.
Is it possible it would have been caught at the wall if it didn’t hit the roof? Absolutely. But the roof didn’t help it along. It was probably going to be somewhere between caught at the wall and several rows deep.
The best proof of this is the left fielder. Just watch his run path from trotting back towards the wall to all of a sudden just moving horizontally in reference to the foul line to catch the ball.
Random Redditor here! I conversely think that it looks like the ball would've stayed playable in the park. Damn, what do we do now? If only we had some measurable data to help us out here!
It looks like there have been 29 batted balls with the same angle and exit velo as this ball. 29 batted balls and the difference between the longest and shortest was over 70 feet. I don't know about anyone else but that tells me that Statcast doesn't have enough data for anyone to use it to draw definitive conclusions about this ball.
That huge range exists almost entirely in the field of play, though. If it were like the longest one went out by 35 feet and the shortest one was 35 feet short, sure, but they almost all fell short, and the only one that didn't had a big tailwind.
You don't need to worry about the difference you can literally take the longest one not flying through coors field air and it wouldn't have been out. The longest one which was hit at coors might have had a shot if it literally hugged the foul pole and you got that thin air pumped into the stadium for this at bat, but that ain't happening at sea level. So as I said this would have to be literally the furthest ball ever with that launch angle and velo to get out. AKA it was a deep fly out, or best case for the padres it hooks foul
It looks to me like the ball would have gone less far if it hadn’t hit the roof. It looks like it would have come down straighter. It’s hard to tell though, I honestly think it’d be caught at the track either way.
We cannot know how much the deflection altered the path left or right, though, or if the natural flight would have been enough foul to be out of play or not, so ground rules come into play and it was called correct by those rules. That is what is largely being lost in this whole argument.
It doesn’t natter if it falls short or not. The special grounds rule for that park specifies any ball that hits the roof and caught means the batter is out.
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u/Both_Ends_Burning San Diego Padres 10d ago
Honestly it probably would’ve never been a controversy in the first place if the stupid announcing crew hadn’t made an absurd argument about it being a home run. They did a terrible job and created a controversy where one didn’t need to exist.