There have so far been two very dramatic turning points in the baseball postseason. Thursday night, the St. Louis Cardinals were up 2-1 with 2 outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 2 (trailing in the series, 1-0) when the Dodgers batter cranked a fly ball to left-centre field. Cardinal outfielder Matt Holladay got to the ball in plenty of time but flubbed the catch (the ball bounced off his chest and onto the field) and a few batters later, the Dodgers would win the game, 3-2, and take a 2-0 stranglehold in the best-of-5 series.
Last night, with the game tied 3-3 in the 11th inning, the Twins batter hit what should have been a ground rule double, but the left field umpire inexplicably called the ball foul. Even as it happened live, I said to Vicki, "Fair ball!" before being astonished to see the ump indicate that it was foul. Every replay showed that the outfielder touched the ball on the way down while being well within the field of play; and even after that, the deflected ball still landed several feet inside of the painted foul line on the ground (making it doubly-fair, as I noted to my bemused wife, at the time). It was one of the strangest - and most blatantly wrong - calls I've ever seen. That batter eventually made an out, after which the next several Twins players got on base. Clearly that double would have resulted in at least one run being scored, but instead Minnesota went to the bottom of the inning still tied... and the Yankees proceeded to win the game, 4-3.
So, in one case it was an unbelievably poorly-timed error on the part of an outfielder, and in the other a jaw-droppingly bad call by an umpire. But both times the tide of the game turned on it, and we ended up with two teams down 2-0 in a short series when they probably should have been tied, 1-1.
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