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Things were looking up in the bottom of the first. Hanley Ramirez launched a three-run jack into the Monster Seats to put his team ahead 3-2. The celebration lasted until the fifth inning when Rick Porcello gave up a bushel of singles and a sacrifice fly to lose the lead. Adam Jones piled on in the sixth inning with a bases-clearing double that clanged off the far part of the left field wall. Paul Emmel left the game with an undisclosed injury in the middle of the fourth inning. John Tumpane, who was at second base, replaced Emmel at home plate. With the switch there was a net loss of 11 years of major league umpiring experience behind the dish. In the fifth inning David Ortiz took issue with third base umpire Jerry Meals’s ruling that he went around on a swing. Ortiz had done the same thing in the first inning and Emmel didn’t toss the designated hitter. Tumpane ejected Ortiz and the hitter made his displeasure known. Pablo Sandoval played a part in the Orioles’ three-run onslaught in the sixth. Everth Cabrera bunted the ball down the third base line and it looked like it could go foul....
Mike O’Malley has enough self-awareness to know how baseball fans regard the interviews interspersed with the game. “Here’s everyone’s favorite part where the actor interrupts the action,” he quipped. The comedy of errors perpetrated by Jerry Meals seemed like something out of one of O’Malley’s sitcoms, but the impact on the American League East standings is more like a crime drama whose plot is ripped from the headlines. If the story seems terribly familiar it’s because you’ve seen it before. “Umpire Meals: Call ‘might have’ been wrong” said the headline from this article on MLB’s own website dated July 27, 2011. Your browser does not support iframes. Perhaps Meals was feeling a bit peaked after 19 innings and wishfully imagined that Michael McKenry’s tag missed Julio Lugo. Perhaps Meals didn’t feel up for extra innings (I mean, jeez, it could go to 19 innings again) and deluded himself into thinking Daniel Nava was out at home in the eighth, thereby avoiding the tie and another multiple-inning slog like he had in Atlanta. Meals’s call was worse than Nava’s baserunning, and that’s saying something. Nava didn’t play Stephen Drew’s deep double to right halfway between second and third, something that a...
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Photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library’s Sports Temples of Boston.