Turns out the weird and dumb plays the Toronto Blue Jays are all too familiar with from Tropicana Field came over to George M. Steinbrenner Field along with the Tampa Bay Rays.
Brandon Lowe’s bizarre three-run homer – which stood despite a ruling of spectator interference on the play – certainly qualifies as very familiar, house-of-horror stuff. We’ll get to the unpalatable word-salad explanation necessary to understand the call in a bit.
First things first though, the third-inning ruling changed the dynamics of what was shaping up as a comfortable Tuesday night for the Blue Jays and starter Jose Berrios, cutting into what was a 4-0 lead. No matter, as Nathan Lukes, who might otherwise have caught the Lowe drive, responded the next inning with a replay-ruling homer of his own to restore some breathing room, and the club’s march to the post-season continued with a 6-5 win.
Berrios escaped that third, worked the fourth and then was pulled from an outing in which he got only two swinging strikes. More tellingly, he went through the lineup only twice and that’s an approach worth keeping an eye on as the Blue Jays move closer to the finish line.
Joey Loperfido added a solo shot in the fifth that made it 6-3, adding on to a lead built in the first on Addison Barger’s RBI single and in the second on George Springer’s two-run single and Vladimir Guerrero’s RBI single.
Relievers Tommy Nance, Eric Lauer, Yariel Rodriguez, Brendon Little, who needed Seranthony Dominguez to bail him out of a messy eighth, and Jeff Hoffman, in a nervy ninth, made it stand up, as the Blue Jays improved to 89-62 with a sixth straight win. Their magic number for clinching a playoff spot is down to three and the AL East down to six, pending the results of their rivals.
OK, now back to weird and dumb.
Lukes did a good job of tracking the Lowe drive to the wall in right and seemed to time his leap perfectly just as the ball was about to clear the wall. As he did that, a fan appeared to lean over the wall, snagging the ball from his grasp and after a moment of confusion, the play was ruled a home run.
The Blue Jays immediately protested and the umpires signalled a crew-chief review. After a long wait, umpire Laz Diaz took the mic and informed the sparse gathering of 8,908 that, “there is fan interference but the ball would have been a home run anyway, so it’s a home run.”
If your reaction was a somewhat less PG version of what the heck, fair, because it feels like both spectator interference and home run shouldn’t be possible.
But in the MLB rules glossary covering spectator interference, the threshold for a batter to be called out on such a play is “when a spectator clearly prevents a fielder from catching a fly ball by reaching onto the field of play.”
In this case, though the replay official ruled that there was spectator interference, he could not definitively determine that the ball would not have left the field of play had spectator interference not occurred. As a result, the call stood.
At a major-league park, with additional camera locations, maybe another angle would have more definitively shown the fan’s arm over the wall. But without that, and with what was clearly spectator interference, the replay official had three options:
Call the batter out if the interference clearly prevented the fielder from making the catch;
Place the runners because the ball would have remained in play;
Rule home run since the ball would have left the playing field regardless.
Three it was, to the Blue Jays’ chagrin.
Lukes’ replay homer was more straightforward, as he also sent a drive to right that Josh Lowe leapt for, with the ball bouncing back on to the field for what was initially ruled a double, with third base awarded for an errant relay to the infield. Upon review, the ball quite obviously cleared the wall, hit off a fan’s hands and returned to the field, leading to a quick overturn for his 11th homer of the season.
Loperfido made life easy for everyone with his no-doubter but there was still late drama for the Blue Jays, because that’s how it always goes for them in Tampa Bay. Still, while the outcome on the Brandon Lowe homer may have gone against them, the result did not, weird or not.
