Sorry Toronto: Umpires were right to blow Addison Barger's double dead

As if this World Series hadn't given us enough drama already, we got some good, old-fashioned umpiring controversy in Game 6 on Friday night, one that — at least in one fan base's view — may have cost their team a title.

The Toronto Blue Jays entered the bottom of the ninth trailing the Los Angeles Dodgers, 3-1. But with Roki Sasaki fading in his second inning of work, the home team smelled blood. An Alejandro Kirk hit-by-pitch put a man on first base, with the speedy Myles Straw brought in as a pinch-runner. Then Addison Barger stepped to the plate, and all hell broke loose.

Barger drove one out to the gap in left-center, and as the ball landed, it lodged right at the base of the wall. For a moment, there was delirium at Rogers Centre, as both Straw and Barger came around to score as center fielder Justin Dean stood there with his arms raised. But that moment was short-lived: Almost immediately, the umpires ruled the ball dead as soon as it stuck, sending Straw back to third and Barger back to second.

Rather than a one-run game with a man on third, or even a tie score, the Jays were now back down two runs. The next batter, Ernie Clement, popped up for the first out. The next, Andres Gimenez, lined out to left field — and after Enrique Hernandez made a running catch, he caught Barger straying too far off second to end the game and force a Game 7 on Saturday night.

It was a truly shocking way for any game to end, much less a potential World Series clincher. And in their shock, Blue Jays fans started crying foul, arguing that the umpires had been wrong to blow Barger's double dead. The ball wasn't really stuck, they said: Look, Dean was eventually able to pick it up with ease! Surely Straw should've been allowed to score, at the very least, and Gimenez's liner would've been a game-tying sac fly had Barger been at third.

But while I understand the impulse to try and find someone to blame, especially when that someone is Rob Manfred and/or the Dodgers, unfortunately the umpires got this one exactly right. The only ones who wronged the Blue Jays were the Blue Jays themselves.

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What does MLB's rulebook say about a lodged ball?

League rules are pretty clear on exactly what's supposed to happen here. Let's all take a look at rule 5.05(a)(7), which says that a batter becomes a runner after [emphasis mine]:

"[A]ny fair ball which, either before or after touching the ground, passes through or under a fence, or through or under a scoreboard, or through any opening in the fence or scoreboard, or through or under shrubbery, or vines on the fence, or which sticks in a fence or scoreboard, in which case the batter and the runners shall be entitled to two bases."

As to what constitutes "sticking," that's up to the discretion of the umpiring crew. But to be clear, there is nothing in the rulebook about the ball needing to be stuck; it's not a question of whether Dean was physically able to remove it from the base of the wall. It should also be noted that there's nothing in the rulebook about a fielder throwing up his hands or not. That's just something that fielders have been taught to do in order to immediately bring an umpire's attention to the situation before a play gets out of hand.

The only question that matters is whether the ball got lodged in the fence in such a way that made it artificially harder for the Dodgers to retrieve it, and gave the Blue Jays' runners more time to advance than they otherwise would've had. And using that definition, it seems pretty obvious that the umpires got it right on Friday night.

Umpires got Addison Barger double right in World Series Game 6

A lot of Jays fans are crying foul, fixating on the fact that Dean immediately threw his hands up only to then later remove the ball from the padding. But again, whether he was technically able to pick the ball up is not what's at issue here. The point of the rule is to prevent a lodged ball from allowing a runner or a batter to take an extra base or two or three while the fielder, who was expecting it to bounce as normal, is running to retrieve it. In other words, the point of the rule is to prevent exactly what happened in Game 6.

And really, if the roles were reversed, is there any doubt that Jays fans would've demanded the call go their way in the other direction? Obviously not, which should tell you something. Sure, Dean could have ran up to the wall and picked the ball up. But that would've cost him several more seconds, seconds in which not only would Straw have scored from first but Barger may have been able to get all the way to third — no small thing as the tying run in the bottom of the ninth. The way the game ended is a gut punch, and I certainly don't blame Toronto for being at a loss. But that doesn't give them the right to start crying foul, and to claim conspiracies where none exist.

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