sycasey said:
bonsallbear said:
So how big is that missed check swing 3rd strike against the Giants now?
Dodgers should be in 1st place by one game.
Just to return to this. The check swing call was bad. But Jansen got some absolute gift strike calls in that AB and Ruf should have walked already.
So I don't want to hear it from Dodgers fans on this one.
It is totally silly to say that the Dodgers should be in first place by one game due to the missed check swing call. Are we going to look at all the calls in that game? All the other lucky/unlucky breaks the Dodgers and Giants got over the course of a 162 game season?
But for the moment, let's do what bonsallbear suggests, focus only on the Ruf at bat against Jansen on July 22. Jansen only got one absolute gift strike call in that AB, because there was only one called strike in the AB, but it did make a HUGE difference.
The pitch in question was pitch number 3, with close to a ball width between the edge of the strike zone and the ball. That's a REALLY bad miss by home plate ump Jansen Visconti. The other two strikes, pitches 4 and 6, were fouled off. Of course, Ruf only swings at pitch 4, also outside, because the count is 2-1 and pitch 3 was called a strike, no way he swings at that pitch if the count is 3-0. Jansen probably throws a different pitch if it is 3-0, surely Ruf would have taken no matter where it was, maybe ball 4, maybe not, and who knows what Jansen would have thrown 3-1 IF he had managed to throw a strike on 3-0.
Andrew Baggerly of the Athletic posted at some point the OBP in at bats following a 3-0 count versus the OBP in at bats following a 2-1 count, I don't remember the specifics, but the difference is HUGE. Just that one call was a HUGE gift to Jansen. Hell, maybe Ruf hits a slam on a 3-1 pitch, or pops up, but we'll never know because Ruf never got a 3-1 pitch.
We'll never know what happens if the umpire makes the correct call on the 2-0 pitch, all we really know is that things would have been different, and it is extremely unlikely that the 3-2 check swing happens like that. The no swing call, however, seemed fair payback for the 2-0 call. Hell, maybe 1B ump Ed Hickox decided he would call no swing on anything close to make up for Jansen Visconti's bad 2-0 call.
BTW, if you go to umpscorecard.com and look at that game, there were "only" 9 wrong ball-strike calls for the game, and on balance, the missed calls favored the Dodgers slightly (a 0.22 net run impact favoring the Dodgers). Focusing on one call is always silly, because other calls impact the game too, but in this case, that call on the 2-0 pitch to Ruf really affected the whole AB.
And, of course, if LA wins that game, it may change other things in the season, too, and we'll never know how the Giants and LA would have done down the road. There would not likely have been big changes in how many games were won down the road, but maybe small changes, maybe the Giants still win the division.
And if we look at ball strike calls over the season as a whole, umpscorecards.com show that over the course of the season, the Giants got screwed more than the Dodgers on ball-strike calls. How many games difference did that make? The bad Angel Hernandez ball-strike calls in the June 28 giants Dodgers game may have been the difference between a Giants win and a Giants loss. Impossible to say, but maybe if the umps call all the ball-strike calls correct for the entire season, the Giants win 110 to 105 for LA. We'll just never know.
I would have like to see how that July 22 game would have turned out if the count went to 3-0 on Ruf. But we don't get that, we just get to know how that AB turned out, bad calls and all, and we know what happened after.
When the Dodgers left San Francisco after the last Giants-Dodgers game of the season on September 5, with the Giants 1 game ahead, I guarantee you that if you convinced the Dodgers that you knew the future and they would finish the season 20-5, every player on the Dodgers and everybody else in the organization would have told you they would win the division with that .800 finish. Unfortunately for them, the Giants also finished .800. It was all remarkable, and didn't hinge on one Ruf AB where Ruf got badly screwed on a 2-0 call.