The Angels star in “Forever Framber”

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Nolan Schanuel

Nolan Schanuel crosses the plate after starting the Angels’ fifth-inning demolition of Framber Valdez Monday.

Framber Valdez started looking a little shaky in the fourth inning Monday. The good news was his Astros supporting him with a 4-1 lead against the Angels and padding it to 6-1 in the bottom of the fourth. The bad news was the top of the fifth.

It wasn’t just that the Angels blasted seven runs in that half inning. It was Astros manager Joe Espada leaving Valdez in to take a beating like that in the first place. Especially considering Espada’s postgame valedictory after the Angels finished what they finally started, a 9-7 win for their fourth win in five games.

“He just kind of was lost,” Espada told reporters postgame. “Started leaving some pitches in the heart of the plate and they put some really good swings on them. “His stuff was really good . . . just that fifth inning he kind of lost the feel for the zone.”

Valdez didn’t look too good in the fourth, either. After more or less cruising through the first three, he threw thirteen pitches only five of which looked genuinely good. He may have been fortunate that the Angels got only two singles in the inning while otherwise grounding into a force out and whacking into an inning-ending double play.

But after Astros left fielder Mauricio Dubón hit a two-run homer off Angels starter Reid Detmers in the bottom of the fourth to set that short-lived 6-1 Astros lead, the Angels went to work almost at once in the top of the fifth, when designated hitter Willie Calhoun smacked a two-strike single to right.

They weren’t exactly looking to detonate bombs. Nobody overswung, nobody tried to turn into a B-2 pilot. But sometimes you can just swing sensibly and discover you’ve a) still got some serious munitions in your bat; and, b) a pitcher who’s throwing you cannonballs without gunpowder behind them.

Valdez walked shortstop Zach Neto on a full count and struck second baseman Kyren Paris out to follow. Up stepped first baseman Nolan Schanuel, and Valdez hung a changeup that got hung into the right field seats. With one swing the Angels cut the Astros’ lead to two.

After a ground out right back to the box, Valdez was all over the place working to left fielder Tyler Ward before Ward finally singled up the pipe. He hung another changeup, sort of, to center fielder Kevin Pillar (he whom the Angels found in the junkyard after Mike Trout went down with a knee injury), and was lucky Pillar could only turn it into a single to left.

Espada still didn’t seem to have a bullpen option at the ready. He’d pay for it with Valdez’s next two pitches. Angels catcher Logan O’Hoppe saw a curve ball hanging deliciously enough to send well into the Crawford Boxes, and right fielder Jo Adell sent a hanging sinker the other way into the right field seats almost immediately to follow.

Just like that, the RBI single by Astros catcher Yainer Díaz and three-run homer by second base mainstay José Altuve in the bottom of the second to stake that early 4-1 lead became pleasant memories for Minute Maid Park fans and just a nuisance of mosquitoes agains which the Angels opened seven cans of Raid in the fifth.

“Things got out of hand there,” Valdez said postgame. “The game started off well and sometimes things happened.”

Unlike Valdez’s previous start, which came a day after the Astros practically emptied the bullpen following Ronel Blanco’s ejection (and subsequent suspension) for sticky stuff in the glove, and which saw Valdez take his team deep en route a 3-0 win, the Astro pen wasn’t exactly taxed for Monday.

But no relief was seen until the top of the sixth, with Rafael Montero taking over. He got a rude hello when Neto caught hold of a rising fastball and sent it to the Boxes. That was all the scoring for the Angels and all they really needed, despite some Astro friskiness in the ninth.

Adell may have broken the Astro spirit to stay for the game when he took off running after Díaz’s leadoff drive to right and took a flying leap to steal a homer from Díaz before he hit the fence padding. “He’s growing in front of your face,” said Angels manager Ron Washington postgame. “That was a big-time play and that play right there may have saved the game.”

It might have, considering Dubón singling to follow and Kyle Tucker driving him home with a base hit an out later. But Angels reliever Carlos Estevez held on despite walking Yordan Alvarez to get Alex Bregman—the veteran third baseman who was usually capable with first and second and two out, able to win it with one swing, until this year (.125/.125/.125 slash in this situation)—to fly out to not-too-deep center for the game.

The Angels set a new precedent at Espada’s and Valdez’s expense, too: this was the first time in the Angels’ history that four players 25 or under cleared the fences in the same game.

“I didn’t realize it until after the fact,” O’Hoppe told reporters. “None of us have said it out loud, but I feel like all of us internally had been waiting for a moment like that for a little while.”

“They’re growing up,” Washington observed. “They’re starting to figure things out. They really didn’t try to do too much and they ended up doing a lot. And that’s what it’s about.” Don’t look now, but they’re 7-6 in their past thirteen games including the four-of-five sealed Monday.

Maybe that thinking brings further unforeseen reward. Especially when the other guys’ manager doesn’t have an immediate bullpen answer for a starter who’s begun losing his stuff clearly enough. The Angels won’t get that lucky that often, but maybe continuing to think less-brings-more begins making their own luck.

A murder-suicide squeeze?

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Pedro Pagés, Zach Neto

Cardinals catcher Pedro Pagés (left) must have pitied Angels shortstop Zach Neto caught cold on the suicide squeeze that wasn’t on Tuesday . . .

Ron Washington must have returned to managing with the idea that the job credentials now require he be in shape enough to throw players under the proverbial bus. Even if it wasn’t their fault his orders couldn’t be executed without at least one fatality.

The Angels manager who called for a bases-loaded suicide squeeze Tuesday had only one thought after Luis Guillorme tried to obey orders on a pitch you’d have required a door for making contact: It was all Guillorme’s fault.

Cardinals reliever JoJo Romero couldn’t find the strike zone with a search party. It took the lefthander a full count to strike the Angels’ eighth-inning leadoff man Jo Adell out. Zach Neto went to a full count before doubling down the right field line, before Romero walked Kyren Paris and Nolan Schanuel to set up the ducks on the pond.

Lefthanded-hitting Guillorme at the plate and Neto on third were given their suicide squeeze orders on a 1-1 count. Romero went into his delivery and Guillorme squared to bunt with Neto charging down the line for home. Except the pitch was well out of Guillorme’s reach, and Neto was a dead man.

Guillorme hadn’t been an Angel for a full week. Washington’s postgame comments must have made him feel as though the nearest available cave wasn’t deep enough for him to hide. “He didn’t do the job,” the manager said. “It wasn’t anything I did wrong. He didn’t do the job. I would have rather went to the ninth inning with a 6-6 lead than gone to the ninth inning the way we did.”

Aside from the brain fart that let Washington speak of a 6-6 lead, he was even more wrong about the erratic Romero: “Wild? He was throwing the ball in the strike zone,” the manager insisted. “Why are you making excuses? He was throwing the ball in the strike zone. (Guillorme) did not get the bunt down. Period.”

I’ve watched the video several times. Romero’s slider went at least two full feet or better outside the zone. Unless Washington thought Guillorme had heretofore untapped diving talent—or looked in the moment like the late behemoth Frank Howard (all 6’7″ and airplane-like arm span of him)—the only way Guillorme might have reached that pitch would have been to throw his bat toward it.

The ball was outside far enough that, even if Guillorme could have gotten the farthest end of his bat on it the ball might have ticked foul, forcing Neto back to third. In that instance, any element of surprise (perhaps the key element in executing a suicide squeeze) would have dissipated likewise. Of course, with the way Romero was throwing Guillorme might have gone from there to draw the game-tying bases-loaded walk, but we’ll never know now.

It’s only fair to say Washington’s intentions were the best. He had lefthander-vs.-lefthander with the bases loaded. He had his man facing a pitcher whose money pitch, a sinkerball, might have been ideal for dropping a suicide squeeze bunt if the pitch came to the plate in the zone. He was trying to avoid a rally-killing, inning-ending double play.

Now it’s even money who was further out of the zone, Romero and his pitches or Washington and his vision. All that’s left to determine is whether Washington turned the play into baseball’s first known murder-suicide squeeze.

With Neto heading home full speed ahead, any thought of Guillorme laying off the pitch was futile. Cardinals catcher Pedro Pagés had set up for a pitch toward the outside corner and was thus in decent position to snare a ball going as far out of the zone as Romero’s pitch went. He had only to hop up to his left and lay his mitt in front of the ball to take it. It looked almost as though Pagés pitied Neto when he stopped the Angels shortstop cold with the sorry-about-that tag.

Four pitches later—you guessed it, another Romero full count—Guillorme struck out swinging to finish the rally killing. The veteran the Angels picked up in a trade with the Braves earlier this month still took one for his manager after the Cardinals banked the 7-6 win. “He made a good pitch. What else can you say?” Guillorme said of Romero. “I tried to get the bat on it. But he made a good pitch.”

It was made good only because Guillorme tried to reach the unreachable. In further fairness it was only the exclamation point on a day when the Angels were as attractive in the field as ten head of cattle with mad cow disease.

Second inning: Angels starting pitcher Reid Detmers wild-pitched Cardinals right fielder Dylan Carson home, before third baseman Cole Tucker threw home wildly off a ground ball, enabling Cardinals second basman Nolan Gorman to score.

Third inning: Detmers let Cardinals first baseman Paul Goldschmidt and designated hitter Alec Burleson pull off a double steal with Carson at the plate. The pair of them had one stolen base between them all year until then and weren’t exactly road runners to begin with. Detmers ended up walking Carson and striking Gorman out, but then he fed Pagés a meatball good enough for Pagés to bag his first major league hit—a three-run double.

The Angels fought their way back, somehow, especially when their catcher Logan O’Hoppe blasted Cardinals starter Sonny Gray for a three-run homer in the fourth and left fielder Taylor Ward send Schanuel home with a sacrifice fly in the fifth. Burleson wrecked the five-all tie with a two-run homer off Angels reliever Amir Garrett in the top of the seventh, but Kevin Pillar—he whom the Angels picked up at the junkyard after Mike Trout went down with his knee injury—pulled the Angels back to within a run with a two-out RBI single.

That set up the 7-6 score Washington wanted Guillorme to close back up with the suicide squeeze. The one Guillorme couldn’t execute on a pitch impossible to reach. The one that prompted Washington to throw Guillorme so far under the proverbial bus he might actually have passed below another bus behind it before coming to a skidding stop.

It’s the same sad song . . .

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Mike Trout

Another season, another unwanted injury for a star-crossed star.

Once upon a time, when cooler heads actually found a hearing in the Angels’ front office, the idea was floated to talk Mike Trout into moving out of center field and into one of the less demanding outfield positions. Maybe even moving him toward designated hitting for the majority of his time in due course, went a reasonable concurrent thought.

With Trout then coming away from some injury-disrupted seasons, they talked about it during the owners’ lockout of 2021-22. They planned to talk to Trout about it when the lockout ended. They didn’t bank on then-manager Joe Maddon blabbing about it to reporters before they had the chance to present it to Trout.

Idea killed before it could spend its first hour out of its crib. Maddon’s execution orders may have been written right there, awaiting only one false move on the season to stamp them irrevocably.

The guillotine blade dropped after those 2022 Angels went from a deceptive 27-17 start to a twelve-game losing streak. And, after Maddon ordered an intentional walk to the Rangers’ Corey Seager with the bases loaded and the Angels down. Just as inexplicably, the Angels overthrew a wider deficit to win that game at the witching hour. It wasn’t enough to save Maddon’s rep or his kishkes.

But the busted Trout plan probably did make it a matter of when and not if the Angels would purge Maddon. The plan might also have kept Trout from inflicting any further great risk upon a body that simply refuses to cooperate with its owner’s iron will.

We may never know whether a leftfielder named Mike Trout or a right fielder named Mike Trout would have managed to avoid some of what bedeviled him from that point forward. 2022: Five weeks on the injured list with a back issue that might yet bear the potential of putting paid to his career. Last season: Hamate bone fracture in July, one game in August, season lost otherwise.

Now we have a spectre that’s only too familiar to baseball world as a whole and Angel fans in particular: Trout on the injured list, about to undergo surgery for a torn meniscus in his knee. Expected to be out anywhere from eight to twelve weeks. Exactly what triggered the tear isn’t quite known, but we do know that Trout felt it go while walking back to the Angels’ dugout.

Even though he said, “It’s just frustrating. But we’ll get through it,” we can’t really know the precise thoughts and feeling that poured into his heart and mind when he noticed the tear and resigned himself to yet another injured list term. If he’s telling himself, “This is getting to be more ridiculous than a contemporary presidential campaign,” there isn’t a jury on earth that would convict him of warped thinking.

Until that injury, Trout spent the season’s first month doing whatever he could to prove he still had what made him both the single most outstanding player of the 2010s and, concurrently, the number five all-around center fielder who ever played the game.

His hitting average was an anemic .220 and pulled his lifetime number down to .299, but even at this writing he leads the Show with ten home runs, while exactly half his 24 hits have been for extra bases. He’s even stolen six bases, something he’d said he wanted to return to doing after letting that side of his run-making game expire after 2019.

According to my Real Batting Average metric (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches), Trout was actually batting .611 before his knee said not-so-fast. Little by little, piece by piece, he put himself back together into a semblance of his 2010s self when disaster decided it was time to speak up. Again.

For his first eight full seasons, Trout’s ability to post wasn’t even a topic. He’d averaged 145 games a year over the eight, and he did things the best players do in their fantasies. After the pan-damn-ically short 2020, his body became an orthopedic experiment. And all he’d ever done wrong was play the game firmly.

He’s also been loyal to a fault to an organisation administered like the Mad Hatter’s tea party, overseen and often overlorded by an owner whose fortune came from marketing but who hasn’t yet figured truly that marketing doesn’t build winning baseball teams.

The Angels had two generational talents, Trout and Shohei Ohtani. The latter took the first available hike as a free agent. The former insists he wants to be around when the Angels return to a winning culture and even a postseason or two. But the Angels’ administration still hasn’t figured out how to restore that culture. And, may not for the rest of Trout’s career—however long his body allows him to have one.

Trout could retire this instant and his Hall of Fame plaque would be prepared for his first-ballot election. That might still outrage fans who still cling to the idiocy that injuries are signs of moral turpitude and character weakness. Those fans should be dismissed.

“It’s not as though he has a singular chronic issue,” writes The Athletic‘s Sam Blum. “They’re all independent of each other, and seemingly haven’t impacted him beyond the duration of their individual recoveries. But they add up to the same problem: an all-time legend who can now no longer stay on the field.”

Trout is still good enough that, as FiveThirtyEight says, “the cost to the Angels of losing him for only a couple of months would be on par with season-ending injuries suffered by other star players.” Indeed.

Almost promptly, the Angels signed veteran Kevin Pillar as a fourth outfielder. Once a good center field defender, he’d be behind Mickey Moniak now despite Moniak’s modest bat. Pillar cleared waivers after the White Sox designated him for assignment. He’s considered good in the clubhouse and has a relationship with Angels manager Ron Washington from Atlanta, where Pillar played last year while Washington was the Braves’ third base coach.

Pillar will cost the Angels nothing more than a prorated major league minimum salary. That’s the least of their losses. Losing Trout—again—costs them something no dollars can replace. But imagine what it’s costing Trout in his mind and heart. Again.

Max the Knife: Let Robby the Umpbot rank the umps

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Max Scherzer

“We need to rank the umpires . . . and talk about relegating (the bottom ten percent) to the minor leagues.”—Max Scherzer.

Hunter Wendelstedt’s toss of Yankee manager Aaron Boone Monday has now been deemed “a bad ejection,” according to SNY’s Andy Martino, citing an unnamed source. “Bad ejection?” How about unwarranted? How about irresponsible? How about letting reputation overrule the moment erroneously?

And, how about Max Scherzer suggesting a very good way to start holding umpires better accountable for such unwarranted, irresponsible errors?

Nobody with eyes to see and ears to hear should have cared two pins that Boone had 34 previous ejections plus a reputation for being a bit on the whiny side. Boone kept his  mouth tight shut following an early warning over a beef involving a hit batsman on a low pitch, but a blue-shirted fan seated behind the Yankee dugout barked and Wendelstedt decided Boone should get the bite.

Wendestedt not only ejected a manager erroneously but doubled down with one of the most mealymouth explanations you’re liable to hear from anyone among the people who are supposed to be the proverbial adults in the room:

This isn’t my first ejection. In the entirety of my career, I have never ejected a player or a manager for something a fan has said. I understand that’s going to be part of a story or something like that because that’s what Aaron was portraying. I heard something come from the far end of the dugout, had nothing to do with his area but he’s the manager of the Yankees. So he’s the one that had to go.

Imagine parents hearing one of their children call them an obscene name while in another’s bedroom, then deciding the child whose bedroom it is should be grounded a week instead of the pottymouth. That’s what Wendelstedt’s ejection was, and the crime didn’t happen from the Yankee dugout but behind it.

The only thing MLB government intends to do, Martino observed, is add the Boone ejection to Wendelstedt’s evaluation for game management. Seasonal evaluations have impacts on whether umpires get plum assignments such as leading crews, working All-Star Games, and working postseasons.

Wendelstedt isn’t a crew chief despite being a major league ump for 28 years. (He works today on Marvin Hudson’s ump crew.) He hasn’t worked an All-Star Game since 2011; he hasn’t worked a postseason series since the 2018 National League Championship Series. You might consider thirteen years since his last All-Star game and eight since his last postseason assignment punishment enough.

But players, coaches, managers are subject to prompt accountability for their misbehaviours. They get fined and/or suspended for bad arguments on the field and MLB government can’t wait to make those punishments public. Blocking an errant ump from the postseason may seem like punishment to you, but how much damage might his regular-season mistakes and doubling down on mealymouth excuses for them have wreaked upon a pennant race?

On 26 July 2011, plate ump Jerry Meals ruled incorrectly that the Braves’ Julio Lugo was safe at the plate in the bottom of the nineteenth on 26 July 2011. Pirates catcher Michael McKenry tagged him out three feet from the plate, and you can see McKenry make the tag right before Lugo stepped on the plate.

Meals apologised profusely after the game and the day after. (He also incurred death threats against his wife and children.) His public acknowledgement of his mistake may have saved his hide; he got to work a 2011 NL division series and was promoted to crew chief in 2015, a rank he held before his retirement in 2022.

But that call cost the Pirates a win after a very long night and helped knock the wind out of their pennant race sails. They were a game out of first in the National League Central when that game ended. They split the next two games with the Braves before hitting a ten-game losing streak, losing fourteen of their next sixteen, and falling to fourth in the division to stay.

There are and have been those umps such as Meals who hold themselves accountable for their mistakes. Umps such as also-retired Jim Joyce and Tim Welke, and still-working Chad Fairchild. Umps such as the late Don Denkinger, who owned up to his infamous 1985 World Series mistake and also came out strong for replay.

Umps such as Gabe Morales, who seemed itching to apologise for blowing the call—when plate ump Doug Eddings asked for help on Wilmer Flores’s check swing, bottom of the ninth, two out and a man on first, the Giants down one run, Game Five of a 2021 NLDS riddled with dubious calls—for game, set, match, and early winter for the Giants. We’ll never know if Flores would have risen to the occasion on 1-2, whether against Max Scherzer or Marvin the Martian, but he should have the chance to try.

What to do about the Wendelstedts? About the Angel Hernandezes, Laz Diazes, C.B. Bucknors? Now pitching on a rehab assignment at Round Rock for the Rangers, Scherzer himself has a thought. A very good one. You’re afraid of Robby the Umpbot? Max the Knife says not so fast, Robby might actually do us a huge favour if he’s deployed properly and baseball government doesn’t screw his pooch:

We need to rank the umpires. Let the electronic strike zone rank the umpires. We need to have a conversation about the bottom—let’s call it 10%, whatever you want to declare the bottom is—and talk about relegating those umpires to the minor leagues.

Scherzer’s said something I’ve argued before. Remember: relegating low-ranking, low-performing umpires to the minors for retraining is precisely what the Korean Baseball Organisation does. If MLB’s government can’t get the World Umpires Association to sit down and talk seriously and reasonably about umpire accountability without Robby the Umpbot, maybe the point that many umps aren’t exactly paranoid about Robby’s eventual advent offers a way to get it without undermining umps or bruising egos too seriously.

Accountability is an absolute must. Max the Knife’s thought put into play would be a far better look than leaving the Wendelstedts excuses to double down on their most grievous errors and verbal diarrhea to follow, or leaving baseball’s government excuses to continue letting them get away with it.

“I don’t care who said it.”

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Aaron Boone

Aaron Boone fingers the culprit impressionist who really barked at umpire Hunter Wendelstedt after Boone kept his mouth shut following one warning. (YES Network capture.)

Umpire accountability. There, I’ve said it again. The longer baseball government refuses to impose it, the more we’re going to see such nonsense as that which Hunter Wendelstedt inflicted upon Yankee manager Aaron Boone in New York Monday.

The Yankees welcomed the hapless Athletics for a set. Wendelstedt threw out the first manager of the game . . . one batter and five pitches into it. And Boone hadn’t done a thing to earn the ejection.

Oh, first Boone chirped a bit over what the Yankees thought was a non-hit batsman but was ruled otherwise; television replays showed A’s leadoff man Esteury Ruiz hit on the foot clearly enough. Wendelstedt got help from first base umpire John Tumpane on the call, and Tumpane ruled Ruiz to first base.

The Yankees and Boone fumed, Wendelstedt warned Boone rather loudly, and Boone kept his mouth shut from that point.

Until . . . a blue-shirted Yankee fan in a seat right behind the Yankee dugout hollered. It looked and sounded like, “Go home, ump!” It could have been worse. Fans have been hollering “Kill the ump!!” as long as baseball’s had umpires. George Carlin once mused about substituting for “kill” a certain four-letter word for fornication. His funniest such substitution, arguably, was “Stop me before I f@ck again!” The subs also included,  “F@ck the ump! F@ck the ump!”

Neither of those poured forth from the blue-shirted fan. Merely “Go home, ump!” provoked Wendelstedt to turn toward the Yankee dugout and eject . . . Boone, who tried telling Wendelstedt it wasn’t himself but the blue shirt behind the dugout. “I don’t care who said it,” Wendelstedt shouted, and nobody watching on television could miss it since his voice came through louder than a boat’s air horn and, almost, the Yankee broadcast team. “You’re gone!”

I don’t care who said it.

“When an all-timer of an ejection happens,” wrote Yahoo! Sports’ Liz Roscher, “you know it, and this qualified.”

There was drama. There was rage. There was the traditional avoidance of blame on the part of the umpire. It’s a classic example of the manager vs. umpire dynamic, in which the umpire exercises his infallible and unquestionable power whenever and wherever he wants with absolutely zero accountability or consequences of any kind, and the manager has no choice but to take it.

Bless her heart, Roscher actually used the A-word there. And I don’t mean “and” or “absolutely,” either. She also noted what social media caught almost at once, that Mr. Blue Shirt may have mimicked Boone well enough to trip Wendelstedt’s trigger even though the manager himself said not. one. syllable. after the first warning.

May. You might think for a moment that a manager with 34 previous ejections in his managing career has a voice the umpires can’t mistake no matter how good an impression one wisenheimer fan delivers.

This is also the umpire whom The Big Lead and Umpire Scorecards rated the third-worst home plate umpire in the business last year, worsted only by C.B. Bucknor (second-worst) and Angel (of Doom) Hernandez (worst-worst). I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating now. Sub-92 percent accuracy has been known to get people in other professions fired and sued.

A reporter asked Boone whether the bizarre and unwarranted ejection was the kind over which he’d “reach out” to baseball government. “Yes,” the manager replied. “Just not good.”

Good luck, Skipper. Umpire accountability seems to have been the unwanted concept ever since the issue led to a showdown and a mass resignation strategy (itself a flagrant dodge of the strike prohibition in the umps’ collective bargaining agreement) that imploded the old Major League Umpires Association in 1999.

The Korean Baseball Organisation is known for its unique take upon umpire accountability. Umps or ump crews found wanting, suspect, or both get sent down to the country’s Future Leagues to be re-trained. Presumably, an ump who throws out a manager who said nothing while a fan behind his dugout barked would be subject to the same demotion.

If the errant Mr. Blue Shirt really did do a close-enough impression of Boone, would Wendelstedt also impeach James Austin Johnson over his near-perfect impressions of Donald Trump?

Well after the game ended in (do you believe in miracles?) a 2-0 Athletics win (they scored both in the ninth on a leadoff infield hit and followup hitter Zack Gelof sending one into the right field seats), Wendelstedt demonstrated the possibility that contemporary baseball umpires must master not English but mealymouth:

This isn’t my first ejection. In the entirety of my career, I have never ejected a player or a manager for something a fan has said. I understand that’s going to be part of a story or something like that because that’s what Aaron was portraying. I heard something come from the far end of the dugout, had nothing to do with his area but he’s the manager of the Yankees. So he’s the one that had to go.

The fact that an umpire can order stadium personnel to eject fans or even toss a loudmouth in the stands himself (it happened to Nationals GM Mike Rizzo courtesy of now-retired Country Joe West, during a pan-damn-ic season game in otherwise-empty Nationals Park) seems not to have crossed Wendelstedt’s mind. The idea of saying “I was wrong” must have missed that left toin at Albuquoique.

Major league umpires average $300,000 a year in salary. If I could prove to have a 92 percent accuracy rate and learn to speak mealymouth, I’d settle for half that.