It was very close. On Sunday, in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series, in the top of the first inning, with one out and runners on first and third base, one-time and future hero play-off hero Jorge Polanco hit a bouncer to the third baseman. The third-place runner went on contact, but the third-place runner did Cal Raleighand while he is relatively fast for a catcher, the Sultan of Squat is not exactly known for his speed. Had the ball hit anywhere other than directly to a corner infielder, he might have easily beaten him. Instead of, Addison Barger’s throw beat Raleigh by at least ten feet in the pocket (the game was in Canada, after all). But it was still very close.
The throw came well in time and was by no means off target. To make sure he didn’t risk hitting the runner, Barger wisely threw the ball to the catcher’s right side – the first base side. Alejandro Kirk’s body. The throw was also not high, but it did reach shoulder height. Raleigh ran as fast as he could, and in the time it took Kirk to swing his catcher’s glove from high on his right to low on his left, he had closed the distance to about three feet. Then Kirk made an important decision. As Raleigh came toward him, he opted not to keep swinging the glove down and toward the plate. He reached for a high tag and at the same time swept the left side of his body aside. Self-preservation undoubtedly played a role in the decision. It cost him valuable inches (God, this feels wrong), and it almost allowed Raleigh to sneak his right shoe between Kirk’s legs and onto home plate before his torso crashed into the glove. For a brief moment, the two catchers looked like colliding galaxies, crashing into each other and then spinning into each other as their gravitational fields intertwined:
In real time, the game went from a certain certainty to an impossibly close call. Maybe Raleigh had his foot in it and maybe he didn’t. The cry on the field was out, and incredibly, the Mariners refused to challenge it. The video was never parsed by the replay room in New York. The chief marketing officer of Zoom Communications, Inc. definitely cried.
In theory, teams must stick with their challenges unless they are confident that the decision in question will be overturned, but in practice they have two challenges in the postseason, and the ability to request a referee’s challenge means that there is effectively no penalty for wasting a challenge. This one wouldn’t have been a waste. The game seemed about as close as it could get, and it provided a chance to take an early lead in Game 1 of the ALCS. It was a no brainer.
After the piece, there were seven repeats of the broadcast in a 55-second period. Two of those reps were replays, so in total we got six corners of the play on the plate. Americans and Canadians leaned into their televisions and watched intently for those 55 seconds, but even if some replays were in slow motion, it just wasn’t enough time to tell for sure. Had Kirk’s tag hit Raleigh’s arm or traveled the extra distance to his stomach? Had Raleigh’s cleat, hidden in a cloud of dirt and chalk, hit the face of the plate or jumped over it? What happened first? The video below shows exactly what the viewer at home saw. It would be impossible for anyone to say for sure what happened after watching these clips just once:
Firstly, we obviously got the real-time action, starting with the midfield camera and moving to the high home camera as soon as Polanco put the ball in play. Even if the game had been slowed down, the distance and angle probably made it impossible to tell when Raleigh hit home plate and when Kirk hit Raleigh:
Then we got a view from directly behind home plate, again at full speed. Raleigh’s body blocked the view of Kirk’s glove, making it impossible to tell when the tag occurred:
The game was moving far too fast to tell what was happening at game speed, so the next shot came in slow motion. The shot was taken from a low angle from the left field line, which meant the camera was behind Raleigh’s body, which again blocked both his foot and Kirk’s glove:
The next slow-motion replay came from a bird’s eye view from above home plate. It was a great shot, but Kirk’s left foot blocked the corner of the plate, making it impossible to tell when Raleigh’s foot hit home plate. The high angle also made it difficult to determine whether Kirk’s glove hit the underside of Raleigh’s right arm or passed right under it and hit him in the stomach, a distinction that certainly seemed to be the difference between out and safe:
Next came a beautiful oversaturated shot from the first base dugout, likely with the help of the super slow-motion cameras that capture footage of check swings. Unfortunately, the angle meant that Kirk was the one between the camera and the glove this time, blocking the view of the tag. The low angle also shortened home plate so much that it almost disappeared. It is difficult to know when the foot hits an invisible plate:
The final shot showed the home plate umpire’s angle of play (so much so that the umpire almost completely blocked the camera’s view). As we’ll see in a moment, this turned out to be the decisive angle, but even in slow motion it was too much for the human eye to follow both the progress of the foot and the moment the glove actually touched the runner. Notice the look on Raleigh’s face. He looks like a three-year-old who finds tags as disgusting as broccoli:
After the first pitch to the next batter, the broadcast switched to shots from an impassive John Schneider in the Blue Jays dugout and a relieved-looking Barger at third base, then replayed from the overhead view and from the umpire’s view. And then the game continued. At the time, no one at home could know for certain whether the decision had been correct, and whether the Mariners’ risky decision to allow the play to proceed unchallenged would prove to be catastrophically prudent:
This is the decisive angle, and it is further delayed from the broadcast repeat. Even at this slow speed, and even zoomed in on the foot or glove, the difficulty of the call is clear. There probably wouldn’t have been a clear enough shot for the replay officials to do anything other than let the call stand. Raleigh’s cleat sent a wave of dirt and chalk from the batter’s box ahead of him. You’ll have to look several times before you get an idea of where the chalk ends and where the cleat begins:
The view of the tag is clearer, but not by much. Clearly, Kirk tapped Raleigh’s wrist instead of his stomach, saving precious inches. But because the view is from behind, the only way to determine when the tag has actually occurred is to look and see when the pressure of the wrist begins to deform the tip of the glove. The first sign is that the back half of the glove, the finger side, begins to protrude above the front half, the thumb side. But even from this perspective and at this speed, it’s still not as clear as we would like:
The dust cloud arrives at the corner of home plate at the exact same time the glove begins to deform. There’s even a puff of white dust right in front of Raleigh’s heel that really makes you think it’s part of the shoe, and that puff of dust was safe! But Raleigh’s heel doesn’t exactly hit the corner of the plate. It’s a few inches to the right, crossing the front of the plate only a frame or two after Kirk’s glove starts to deform, and a frame or two after the dust puff. Raleigh is out by a margin that’s about as small as you can imagine. (Okay, I’ll say it: Raleigh was off by millimeters.) Below are the images side by side, with the moment each action takes place marked with a big “NOW.”
Reasonable people might disagree even after seeing this footage, but this is the best we can get without being in the replay room ourselves. Now that we have arranged it and are still going to arrange it, we are all going to Tim Horton’s.
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