In the wacky game of baseball, if you watch long enough you’re inevtiably going to see something you’ve never witnessed before.<\/p>\n
Talking to writers who’ve covered the Milwaukee Brewers for two decades, attending thousands of games at American Family Field, you’ll hear them say they’ve never seen a batted ball hit the roof before. Game 1 of the National League Division Series changed that.<\/p>\n
In the 9th inning, with the Padres trailing the Brewers 3-2 and Dustin Harris on 3rd base, San Diego 1st baseman Ty France hit an absolute rocket. It left the bat at 105.3 MPH with a launch angle of 49 degrees. France stood in the batter’s box knowing there were only two possible outcomes: it’s a home run or an extremely long strike. He never considered it would become an out.<\/p>\n
“I guess the biggest question was, was it going to stay fair or foul?” says France. “I thought I back spun it and it was going to stay fair. I knew it was going out.”<\/p>\n
Then the roof of the stadium intervened.<\/p>\n
The blast caromed off the roof and shot down to the warning track into the glove of Jackson Chourio (who deserves a ton of credit for not giving up the bizarre play) allowing the Brewers to complete a 3-2 win to take a 1-0 series lead. Several people involved in the game had a good look at the play. All of them have an opinion on whether or not it was going to be a go-ahead homer. Some, like France, are convinced it was going to leave the yard.<\/p>\n
“I thought it was a homer, for sure. 100%,” says Padres 3rd baseman Manny Machado.<\/p>\n
He’s backed up by Brewers catcher William Contreras, who had the best view of the blast outside of France.<\/p>\n
“I think that if that ball doesn’t hit there it might break the glass,” says Contreras, referring to the windows high above the left field fence.<\/p>\n
Other aren’t completely sure where the ball would have landed.<\/p>\n
“Off the bat, I think I thought it was going for a second. I was able to see it and I think I had a chance on the ball the whole time. I’m not sure, but I think that ball might have tailed foul at the end,” says Chourio.<\/p>\n
Padres manager Craig Stammen tried to stay in the middle as much as he could when asked if he thought the ball would have cleared the fence.<\/p>\n
“Yeah, I think so,” says Stammen. “I mean, you never know when a guy hits a ball how well he got it. But, you look at the exit velocity, look at the launch angle, plus AI into it and figure out how far it would go.”<\/p>\n
That was a familiar refrain inside the Padres clubhouse after the game. The ground rules of the stadium, which is 25 years old, dictate a ball that hits the roof in fair territory is a live ball. If it hits in foul ground it’s a dead ball. The Padres said it was a tough pill to swallow but never questioned the umpire’s decision. The ground rules are the ground rules and they were properly followed.<\/p>\n
However, a few Friars think it’s time to rethink a few things in the Statcast era.<\/p>\n
“With all the technology we have in this game, I think that’s one of the situations where we kind of know what’s going to happen. How the ball is hit, the launch angle, everything,” says Machado. “I mean, they put it up on the board where you hit it 25 degrees, 380 (feet), you know, at 108 MPH, (it’s a) homer at 30 ballparks out of 30. So, I mean, I think we should we should have the technology to have a better call there.”<\/p>\n
What makes this situation even more confounding is there’s even debate about the math. Statcast suggests a ball hit with these metrics (105.3 MPH, 49 degrees) would only be a home run in Houston’s ballpark. However, the ball was caught about eight feet in front of the wall and physics tells us a baseball colliding with a metal surface at that speed and angle will lose about 40% of its energy, which one would think is more than enough to cover those final eight feet.<\/p>\n
Or, maybe Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy was right when he proposed one other theory: divine intervention from the late, great Bob Uecker.<\/p>\n
“I think the only thing that you could possibly figure on the ball that everybody’s going to be talking about is that Ueck decided to put his hand on it and swat it down Chourio could catch it. So thanks, Ueck.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the wacky game of baseball, if you watch long enough you’re inevtiably going to see something you’ve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":484703,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[2674,74,76,75,2611],"class_list":["post-484702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-padres","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-san-diego-padres"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}