Marcell Ozuna got sat down on strikes despite never seeing a pitch in the zone thanks to one overzealous umpire.
The Atlanta Braves stomped the New York Mets 9-2, but it didn’t come without the umpire struggling to find the strike zone during a Marcell Ozuna at-bat.
Atlanta always seems to have issues with umpires and bad calls. However, the home-plate umpire in Wednesday’s game couldn’t find the strike zone to save his life.
Ozuna didn’t get just one lousy call, but three awful strike calls that were obviously balls.
Pitch one came in slightly lower than expected and would probably be the only one of the three “strikes.” While the second pitch was far right of the plate, and of the three was the most unmistakably a ball, but the umpire thought otherwise.
Marcell Ozuna got bamboozled by the umpire with three terrible calls.
You could fit another baseball between the strike zone and where the actual pitch went, but don’t try and tell home plate that.
Visibly frustrated, Ozuna kept his cool, and in the video, it looks like he says something about the call but quickly gets ready for the next pitch. That umpire’s tom-foolery wasn’t over with because that third pitch was — you guessed it, to the right and low.
Even on that second pitch, James McCann, the Mets catcher, had to move his arm, catch it and sell it like it was a strike, but it wasn’t that good of a fake-out — it only fooled this umpire.
A 9-year-old, in his first year of live pitching, wouldn’t have swung at two of those pitches. A 90-year-old man with bifocals could see none of these pitches were strikes, but this umpire called it. There has to be a way to monitor these terrible calls and limit them.
Ozuna struck out instead and headed back to the dugout. This game wasn’t his best outing as he went 1-of-5 from the plate when his lone hit came from a single in the top of the sixth inning.
These terrible calls are what frustrates so many fans because it’s apparent that they weren’t strikes. If it were a closer pitch then the argument would be invalid, but there are far too many occurrences that end like this.
This video is why people are thinking about computer-generated umpires because the current ones aren’t doing a very good job of hiding bad calls.
Ozuna got screwed, but thankfully, the Braves could hold off their rival and get a much-needed victory.