Was it the heat? Did the umpires go all Dock Ellis on us?
Were they training the 2011 scorekeepers tonight and just forgot to tell everyone? This was a weird little trip through the baseball rulebooks kind of game with a little bit of everything including many of the more oddly scored situations in baseball. We had a balk, a batter’s interference, balls lost in the lights creating a was it an error or wasn’t it situation (oh, it was totally an error says this former stat girl), a failed hit and run with no resulting outs, runs walked in, runs hit by pitched in (Are there any former stat keepers out there - quick, who gets the RBI? ;) ), righties, lefties, a submarine pitcher (which looks so cool when he is on that I can see why he's sometimes a stone plated b to hit off of), a wandering strike zone, pinch runners, and one awesome run Napoli had to slide under Suzuki and roll him away from the plate much like one might pick up a child with their feet to score. We also had a completely new rule invented on the spot - the catcher has to catch the foul tip cleanly for it to be an out, even if the ball never touches the ground. Yeah, somehow, I suspect this one is not going to be a , thank goodness ;)
There were other good things tonight that are sadly odd this season: we came back from behind to win the game, the closer actually closed, Izzy and Aybar were back and contributed, and we had our bats! And, hey, we got to see the big boys played again! If your team can't get it together for the playoffs, at least they can be entertaining in the final stretch, right? Light it up.