Who's To Blame?

I was watching ESPN's Pardon the Interruption earlier today and listened in as Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser debated the Dewayne Wise "no catch" from yesterday's Yankees game (in case you haven't seen in - which would be surprising, given that every sports news outlet has been running the highlight nonstop for the past 24 hours - the video is here).  Clearly, Wise's catch-that-wasn't was a pretty big screw up by MLB standards, and that type of thing should never happen in a professional baseball game.  Wilbon and Kornheiser were arguing about who deserved the blame for the errant call, but I believe the two analysts were missing the point.  In my mind, both Wise and the umpire are to blame for the incorrect call, each for a different reason.

Without a doubt, third base umpire Mike DiMuro made both physical and, more importantly, mental errors on the play.  Although replays clearly showed that Wise dropped the ball even before flying into the stands in foul territory (see the photo below for evidence), DiMuro thought he saw the left fielder catch the ball cleanly.  DiMuro made a mistake, and that's very forgivable - after all, even Major League umpires make these kinds of mistakes regularly, and in my opinion these imperfections are a large part of what makes baseball so fun.  Where the umpire really messed up, however, was in not asking Wise to show him the baseball after the "catch" and before calling the batter out.  Asking to see the ball is standard procedure on these types of plays, and DiMuro's failure to do so was an example of a complete brain freeze.  For this, he deserves a significant amount of blame, and should be reprimanded accordingly by Major League Baseball.

Looked like a pretty clear drop to me. Obviously Mike DiMuro saw things differently.

Dewayne Wise, on the other hand, made an ethical error.  Obviously, Wise knew that he didn't catch the ball.  When DiMuro called the batter out, Wise had a rare opportunity to do the right thing and admit to dropping the baseball, injecting a rare drop of good sportsmanship into a sport looking for more "good guys" in the post-steroids era.  Although he is a professional baseball player paid to get hits and field the ball, Wise and the rest of the Yankees are role models for the young sports fans of New York, the U.S. and the world.  While Wise might not have had a responsibility to report his drop (there's no MLB rule or law that requires a player in this situation to report a blown call), he had a tremendous opportunity to do something right and get recognized for it on a national stage.  Instead, he did exactly what we'd expect him to do - lied (or, at best, failed to tell the truth) and got away with it.

Within a few days, everyone will surely forget about DiMuro's bad call and Wise's bad morals, and I think in this case that's probably a good thing.  After watching the game's highlights, I definitely felt disappointed about the way things played out.  It wasn't Wise's bad morals that upset me, though - it was the fact that I wasn't the least bit surprised that the left fielder reacted the way that he did.  I'm still hoping that the next time a similar situation arises the player involved will live up to reality, but I'm not going to hold my breath.