Copyright 1999 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.

THE DISAPPEARING HOMER: IN THE PARLANCE OF THE GAME, 'WE WUZ ROBBED!'
by Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

Whatever the outcome of this year's baseball season -- whether champions are crowned in New York, Boston or Atlanta; whether umpires are rebuked for their clear bad judgments in a year when several of their number were summarily dumped; whether good pitching can recover from a year of potent bats; or whatever else comes out of it -- 1999 has provided one clear instance of the powers of the game not having the ability to truly see things as they are and instead retreating, like Pharisees and spoiled children, into their legalistic, rationalistic ways that elevate arcane logic over the fun of the game.

For those who may not have seen Game Five of the National League Championship Series between the Atlanta Braves and the New York Mets, let me summarize its ending.

The record-setting game lasted 15 innings and took five hours and forty-six minutes from beginning to end. It was played in a steady rainfall from the sixth inning on, and between them the two teams used 45 players. The Braves, who have only nine pitchers on their staff, used six of them. The Mets, who have 11 pitchers on the roster, used nine of them.

In their half of the 15th inning, the Braves scored a run to take a 3-2 lead. Dramatically, in the bottom half of the 15th inning, the Mets scraped out a run to tie the score, and with the bases loaded and only one out sent third baseman Robin Ventura to the plate.

Ventura launched a line drive to right-centerfield that cleared the right-field fence over the 371-foot marker, giving the Mets a victory.

In running the bases, Ventura was mobbed by his jubilant teammates at second base. In the excitement and celebration, Ventura never completed running the bases -- nor did two of the baserunners in front of him. The Mets needed only one run to win and they got that when Roger Cedeno scored from third base on Ventura's hit.

In a clear phenomenon of baseball, Ventura had hit a game-ending grand slam home run.

But in the grandiose wisdom and small-minded chicanery of baseball's official scoredom -- in this case, one Red Foley and the Elias Sports Bureau -- Ventura, because he never completed his "home run trot" and touched all four bases, is credited with a mere single, a game-winning, fence-clearing single to be sure but, nevertheless, a single.

Undoubtedly, it will be for many years to come the most extraordinary single ever hit to win a ball game.

Mets manager Bobby Valentine, who spent time in Japan as a manager, knows well the Japanese concept of a "sayonara homer"; that is, a game-winning home run hit by the home team in the last inning that in effect says to the opponents and fans in the stadium, "Sayonara," or good-bye.

Valentine's hero of game five, Ventura, will be credited for hitting a "sayonara single."

Ventura now joins the hall of baseball trivia as the player who hit a dramatic game-winning grand slam home run but was credited only with a single.

The Mets appear to have won the game by a score of 7-3, but in the by-the-book ruling of the official scorer only one run scored on Ventura's hit because the runners only advanced the one base they necessarily had to and then became caught up in the celebration at second base. Thus, the official scorer ruled the Mets won the game 4-3.

There was no attempt by the Braves to make a play on any runner; indeed, they could not have retrieved the hit ball had they so desired.

The moment that each of the base umpires determined that Ventura's ball had cleared the fence and that each base-runner had advanced 90 feet, those umpires disappeared into the grandstand. Even if Ventura had completed his circuit of the bases, there was no umpire on hand to determine that he touched each base.

Interestingly, the umpires in the clubhouse, according to the Associated Press, claimed that both Cedeno and John Olerud crossed home plate, so officially -- granting a rigid rulebook technicality -- the score might be 5-3.

For everyone in the ballpark, the game ended when the hit ball cleared the wall. The game ended with a grand slam home run.

In fact, I suspect that the official scorer's recording of the time that the game ended is defined by the ball leaving the ball park, not by the time it took the runners to complete their circuit of the bases. Had the record-setting time of play been dependent on the players touching bases, the clock should technically still be running.

So an obscure question for the official scorer becomes: "At what time did the game officially end?"

I don't believe any of the Braves remained on the field to issue an appeal in the event that one of the runners did not touch the appropriate base. Besides, as we know, there was no one left on the field to whom they could have made such an appeal.

My point is that once Ventura's hit cleared the fence, all else became superfluous except to small minds. Even the groundskeepers raced out and pulled up the bases before Ventura could get around them.

I'll leave it to the suffocating statisticians to rifle through the rule books and determine if Ventura could go to the ballpark hours later and touch all the bases to get credit for his homerun (with Todd Pratt running in front of him, of course).

I'll leave it to the arcane asterisk suppliers to somehow explain to future generations of fans that Ventura's hit left the ball park and technically was a grand slam home run but is listed as a single. (But remember, another asterisk will have to go next to Braves pitcher Kevin Mcglinchy's name because the official scorer's decision reduced his earned runs for the game by three.)

The shame is that statistics should officially rob the game of a wonderful phenomenon. I'm just an old baseball sentimentalist who thinks a home run is a home run is a home run.

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Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net