
On Friday, the Cardinals made a late-night comeback thanks to a 3-run homer by Ivan Herrera in the 9th inning that put the Cardinals up a run. That did not end up being the story of the game however. The story of the game happened a few innings earlier when some of the most egregiously bad umpiring I’ve personally ever witnessed nearly led to a Cardinals loss. I can’t claim that without the Herrera home run the Cardinals would have lost because of the umpiring. It definitely led to a run the Rockies wouldn’t have otherwise scored, but they did score another run after the bad call and there wasn’t two outs when the call was made. Thankfully, we don’t have to speculate, because Ivan Herrera made it irrelevant.
The win softened my anger towards the situation. I think I might still be angry about it if the Cardinals didn’t win that game. If I actually stop and think about what happened and that there will be no real consequences for what happened, then I get incredibly frustrated all over again. I think this might cost the crew a playoff appointment, but that’s not a punishment. Not getting a reward is not the same thing as a punishment.
And because this has made national news and because I do consider this a big deal, I wanted a history of what happened on this site. I think an article detailing what happened will hopefully be informative to people who didn’t get to see what happened for starters. And the sites I’ve seen cover this have either glossed over things or neglected part of the story. I wanted to take a crack at it.
CALL IS CONFIRMED
Our story begins in the top of the 6th. Coming back from the injured list, Andre Pallante threw just 5 innings, although he was efficient. His pitch limit just happened to be 75 pitches. The Cardinals, with a tired bullpen, turned to rookie Hancel Rincon. He had been called up earlier in the week, but manager Oliver Marmol had been reluctant to use him in tight games against the Dodgers. And no disrespect to Rincon, but that reluctance was justified by how he pitched in his first two games, albeit Coors Field is a hard place to debut as a pitcher. Not sure the Dodgers lineup would have been much easier.
Hunter Goodman hit a weak lineout to secure his first out. Good start. TJ Rumfield then hit a ball off the wall that is a homer in 28 parks, but not Coors Field. Jordan Walker misplayed it into a triple, but nearly recovered well enough to throw out the runner at 3rd base. Contrary to what many people think, the runner was safe even if Nolan Gorman never dropped the ball. But Gorman dropped the ball upon hitting the runner. For some reason, Marmol challenged this. Maybe it was a desperate attempt to get a rookie a second out and also just the cool factor if Walker actually pulled off the play.
You can hear the start of the Rockies announcers being kind of surprised at Doug Eddings’ tone in announcing that the call was confirmed. This obviously isn’t a big deal, but I do think it is part of the story. I’ll share the rest of the Rockies’ announcers reaction to his call, because they almost react to Eddings’ call as if they were Cardinals’ announcers. But they’re homers on the other side. They noticed how he announced that the call was confirmed.
Also I have to share this because it is VERY relevant to what happens later, because the Cardinals no longer had a challenge. Doug Eddings knows the Cardinals no longer have a challenge.
“Not on my field”
Here’s where Doug Eddings loses quite a bit of his nonexistent credibility. His excuse in Derrick Goold’s piece was that Hunter Goodman asked him if Rincon was allowed to wear his hat like that. That just does not feel like something an MLB player would say. Obviously he is allowed if you’ve watched baseball in the last two decades. Goodman has faced Sonny Gray before and I think he’s watched baseball growing up, and it’s a thing you see all the time. That, however, is not why Eddings loses credibility.
It’s because he didn’t ask Rincon to fix his hat when Goodman was batting. He didn’t ask him when the next batter, TJ Rumfield, was up either. After the triple and the missed challenge, Rincon threw a wild pitch that allowed Rumfield to score. He then threw another ball to make it 2-0. It was at this point that Eddings requested Rincon straighten his hat, which he did without complaint. Can you explain to me, in Doug Eddings version, why he would wait two batters to ask him to straighten his cap? Wouldn’t you ask immediately?
Oh and this is to say nothing of the absurdity of just granting Goodman’s request because he asked. Yes, I’m sure power hungry Doug Eddings is going to do what a player asks, sure, makes sense. Rincon then gives up an inside-the-park homer to Cole Carrig thanks to a misplay by Nathan Church and Joshua Baez not backing up the play – it was a real team effort in awful outfield defense that inning. Connor Norby then hit a very weak bloop single and Marmol really wanted to win the game, so he took Rincon out.
And while Justin Bruhl was warming up, Marmol argued with Eddings about the hat situation. Marmol was not a fan of that exchange, we’ll say. Marmol walks back to the dugout, Edding is not even in position to call balls or strikes, and he gleefully called a pitch clock violation on Bruhl – who was not capable of pitching because Eddings wasn’t even behind the plate. Pretty sure he had no grounds to call a pitch clock violation. I would go point-by-point and share the video of each point I’ve made in this section, but Twitter user Umpire Auditor covers all of this in a one-minute video if you’re interested in watching.
I would share the MLB official video, but the Film Room contains an 8 second video just telling you that the Cardinals got a pitch clock violation with no context. After the pitch clock violation, Marmol got himself thrown out. There will presumably be a Jomboy video that I expect to be 5+ minutes long that should give us the back-and-forth, but needless to say, Marmol’s message to Eddings was clear: “Grow the f—k up.” If I could condense everything he said to Eddings to encapsulate his message, those four words would be it.
Terrible call
Hampered with a 1-0 count through no fault of his own, Bruhl managed to throw two strikes to make it a 1-2 count on Troy Johnston. Unfortunately, Bruhl allowed a very Coors double to Troy Johnston and then a line drive single to Adeal Amador. That tied the game at 4-4 and runners were still at 1st and 3rd with one out. Zac Veen attempted a bunt, but it was perfectly played by Bruhl who used his glove to toss the ball to a waiting Leonardo Bernal, who barely had to move his glove when Johnston’s hand went directly into Bernal’s glove, well before he ever touched home plate. I actually don’t know if he even touched home plate to be honest. You be the judge.
Johnston literally walked towards the dugout mouthing he was out. It was the easiest call an umpire will ever make. Doug Eddings was in perfect position to see it. I don’t think Doug Eddings is literally blind, but him being literally blind is the best case scenario for Doug Eddings. Because if he’s not blind, he probably could see perfectly well that he was out. But he had made up his mind that he was going to call him safe. That part is true no matter what. Even if his brain convinced him he was actually safe, he 100 percent had made up his mind that he was going to be safe before the play even happened. It was that bad of a call.
In fact, Doug Eddings has only himself to blame if he gets offended that we think he called him safe even though he knew he was out. He provided us with a preponderance of evidence. If this were a court room, I think just about any jury would convict him. The weird, emphatic “confirmed” call that began the entire inning, him telling a player he needed to straighten his hat and then lying about the reason why he did that, the bogus pitch clock violation and ejection of Marmol – it’s an embarrassment of riches. He made it nearly impossible to come to any other conclusion.
Aftermath
Like I said, I think the fact the Cardinals ended up winning the game soothed tensions. I think we may have gotten a very different reaction from Oliver Marmol and the players had the Cardinals lost. But since they won, they were more subdued. Even so, Marmol did not hold back in his postgame interview.
The team rallied around Rincon. The next time they took the field, every player had their cap tilted to the side during warmups. And according to the Cardinals broadcast, manager Warren Sheaffer and Rockies players were none too happy that Eddings threw Goodman under the bus. It’s not shown in the following clip, but apparently some Rockies participated in the protest too.
How bad of an umpire do you have to be to piss off both teams with your actions? And I’ll go one further. This was such unfathomably bad umpiring that I have seen Cubs fans comment in support of the Cardinals. In the heat of the moment, I tweeted that Doug Eddings purposefully made the wrong call and I got 2,600 likes. I do not have that many followers. The likes were from every conceivable fanbase you can imagine: at a glance, I saw Cubs, Phillies, Jays, Guardians, Padres, Yankees, Red Sox, Orioles, and Twins and there’s probably more but not everyone lists their fanbase in their profile or name and I stopped halfway through.
Let me reiterate my point one more time: that was a call so bad that rivals of the Cardinals agreed that an umpire purposefully made the wrong call to spite the Cardinals. I didn’t get called biased once. One person asked how I knew that. That is literally the extent of the pushback I got for claiming that an umpire made the wrong call on purpose. There aren’t enough words in the world to properly express how insane that is.
Doug Eddings apologized to Hancel Rincon because he had to basically. Eddings was told by MLB that he went too far according to Ken Rosenthal. Prior to the apology of course. And again aside from not being invited to the playoffs, which is the literal bare minimum of “consequences,” he will otherwise face zero repercussions for this. In the meantime, this is the kind of thing that rallies a team together and while it’s probably too late, let’s hope it fuels them to a playoff appearance.






















