It’s hard to convince people to go to Marlins Park, the Marlins are a little less difficult to play, but still. Thus, it is the responsibility of the Fellows to give the audience a program, especially when there is an actual audience.
So the credit for last night’s fight goes to Bill Welk’s umpiring crew for giving the 12,941 announced human presence a bit of a show and Miami’s hitting coach Marcus Thames getting into the spirit of the thing. Since the crowd was a typical Saturday-size crowd and the Milwaukee Brewers are a very good team but still not a magnet, Welke and Thames watched and shared their moment.
Miami were in the middle of the second four-run innings in the sixth (Brewers starter Eric Lauer’s fourth off was one before them) while Welke was working on the plate, confused about counting center fielder Jesus Sanchez. Sanchez tested his swing in a stealth base attempt by Avicil Garcia. But not just Welk, the whole crew of Chris Segal, Dan Margel and Andy Fletcher. The calculation that was 1-1 at the time of Trevor Gott’s pitch has been a mystery for ages, which can be summarized as follows:
It points out to Thames, of course, in the best possible way, that remembering the two pitches shouldn’t be too much of a task, and Welke responds that sending Thames to the clubhouse is actually easier than that. Among them, they saw a four-minute delay in a game that eventually lasted three hours and thirty minutes if sometimes unavoidable and felt that the crowd needed something to hold their attention.
So they’ve improved the Thames’ ejection, no doubt for the price of entertainment, when everyone in the New York video booth was collecting fingers to count to three. This is not a complaint about robo-umpires or the quality of performance, and sometimes something that seems inexplicable to our common people, but congratulations to Welke and Thames for understanding the entertainment element that baseball often forgets. While Thames could spice up his ejection by throwing a few bats and a Gatorade cooler on the field to make the audience more spectator-pleasing, this is an initial effort that is important. After all, people who talk about the human element often forget the element that makes people valuable – willing to take a ridiculous situation (which the Marlins won 9-3) and make it irrational.