The umpire that made the phantom balk call on Steve Kline was back to his usual antics, and blew 2 calls against Detroit to give the O’s a chance to attempt a comeback in the ninth inning of tonight’s game. The first bad call was when Sammy Sosa was hustling down the line after hitting a slow roller to the shortstop. The throw from the shortstop was high, pulling the first baseman off of the bag and into the air. Sammy appeared to get his left leg in and foot on the bag before the tag was applied, but the replay showed that the first baseman’s glove hit him in the chest before he touched the bag. The second blown call happened when B.J. Surhoff hit a sharp grounder back to the pitcher in what appeared to be a game-ending double play opportunity, but the pitcher threw it softly to the second baseman that was waiting to relay it to first. Because of that delay, the play at first was closer then it should have been, and B.J. appeared (again) to hit the bag at the same time that the first baseman caught the ball and he was called safe. Also again, the replay showed that B.J. was actually out.
You may think I’m complaining about these calls, and you’d be right. These blown calls extended a game in which we had little hope (the O’s offense was nonexistent), and caused me a great amount of additional anxiety that I didn’t need. 
Bruce Chen pitched well for us, but started to get hit in the 7th, upon which our iffy bullpen came in and gave up 4 more runs to seal the game for the Tigers. Detroit definitely has the O’s number this year…
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | R | H | E | |
| BAL | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 7 | 0 |
| DET | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 0 | X | 5 | 8 | 2 |
The O’s record is now 32-22.
This entry was posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2005 and is filed under Baseball, O's. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.