Yankees 6, Blue Jays 4: The Real Star Here is Home Plate Umpire Phil Cuzzi

Ricky Romero, a man squeezed.

I am not, generally speaking, critical of umpires. It's a ridiculous job, really, especially at home plate: make a couple of hundred split-second calls over a three-hour period, each of which can later be scrutinized in high definition slow motion, except not by you, ever. And get them all right, or else people will be irate. That's tough. I've read Bruce Weber's As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of the Umpires (read a sizable excerpt at the NY Times site), and even though I think Weber's work would have been better suited to a New Yorker-length essay rather than a full-length book, I realize how awful the life of a minor league umpire is, so awful, in fact, that anyone with any other options at all in life would do probably choose to do something other than become a minor league umpire, which means the people who make it to the top are actually . . . how best to say this . . . not always awesome? 


Anyway. I am sympathetic. I am not quick to condemn umpires. But Saturday afternoon in Yankee Stadium, home plate umpire Phil Cuzzi was, in my view (but not mine alone), baffling and awful and wrong.


Ricky Romero, who lost for the first time in nine starts (last loss: July 16 vs. the Yankees), was getting squeezed mercilessly in the early going, whereas the awesomely horrible-bodied Bartolo Colon could do no wrong. It was perverse. I am not going to do the thing that happens on the internet where we all get worked up about how the Yankees get all the calls, because I don't at all know that that is true, but yesterday Phil Cuzzi was doing his best to lend credence to that probably incorrect argument. It got so bad, in fact, that absolutely beloved third base coach and miracle-working infield instructor Brian "Butters" Butterfield lost his cool and got run. How many times a year do you usually see the third base coach get run? Any? At all? If it's too much for Butters, it's too much for me. And yet, despite all this tomfoolery, had the Blue Jays' best reliever gotten Robinson Cano out after getting ahead 0-2, everything would have been fine. A strange game, this baseball.


Amid all this bitterness and frustration, though, we must salute Dewayne Wise, who came in as a sub for Eric Thames ("dizzy symptoms"), and ripped a triple and a home run. Also homering: Adam Lind, which, I mean, is nice, but did you know it has gotten so bad that Adam Lind is currently rocking a .745 OPS? And that he didn't draw a walk for a month? It saddens me that he has become something of a disaster out there. Finally, Brett Lawrie started a particularly nifty 6-4-3 double play, further establishing that he owns.


KS