Astros fan provides real reason for replay

Get the woo out of here. During 2018, Rockies manager Bud Black had made two dozen previous challenges of a call made by the umpiring crew on the field. But with his 25th challenge of the season Wednesday night, Black demonstrated the real reason instant replay was invented for use in the major leagues.

Right there, in living color on the humongous videoboard in Coors Field, replay busted a Houston fan among the orange-clad, Ric Flairwooing fools that invaded our ballpark. This yahoo was busted for reaching over the left-field fence and clumsily interfering with Colorado outfielder Gerardo Parra.

And replay proved conclusively what many of us have suspected: Front-running Astros fans don’t even know how to catch a baseball, much less how to act at a big-league game.

The majors adopted the current, extensive replay system four years

ago, but I must admit a get-off-my-lawn grumpiness for the widespread use of this technology until the top of the sixth inning on a damp summer evening.

With two outs, Astros third baseman Alex Bregman smacked a pitch from Colorado’s Jon Gray toward the bleachers in left field.

The ball, however, died at the wall, with Parra camped out on the warning track, posed to turn the danger into a long out.

But instead of making the catch, Parra flinched and the ball bounced off his left shoulder. Bregman motored all the way to third base, putting himself in position to extend Houston’s 2-1 lead.

And that’s when Black hopped off the front step of the Colorado dugout, asking the umpire crew to take a look at what happened. Did he know immediately what happened?

“That’s 380 feet away. It’s dark. I’m 61 years old and my eyesight’s not there. How am I going to see it?” said Black, giving full credit to Brian Jones, the staffer who monitors every second of every game for possible replay challenges.

What happened is a man wearing an Astros jersey had reached over the fence with a glove. For a moment, let’s shelve the debate whether any self-respecting fan over the age of 12 should be caught with a mitt at a major-league game. But if you’re going to wear a glove in public, you should at least know how to operate it.

And Astros Fan made the worst play on a ball by somebody wearing an orange jersey in Denver since the last time Isaiah McKenzie muffed a punt for the Broncos. Without the deflection off the fan’s glove, there would have been no triple by Bregman.

Keen eyes in the Colorado dugout caught the error. Replay overturned the mistake. Justice was served. The offending Houston fan was politely escorted away by a ballpark usher. Bregman was not pleased.

I’m not very good at reading lips, but Bregman reacted to the decision to erase his triple by shouting: “Well, that’s fabulous.”

Or perhaps words a wee bit saltier.

Know what’s even better? Everybody except the Astros fans went home from LoDo happy. Charlie Blackmon smashed a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth to give Colorado a 3-2 victory.

Woo!

Don’t get me wrong. I like Texans.

If not for Texans, who would be so kind as to subsidize our Colorado ski resorts by paying full price for a lift ticket at the window?

But allow me to offer a friendly piece of advice: For the past two evenings, there was a plague of Astros fans, many of whom didn’t know George Springer from Jerry Springer until last October, who swarmed our ballpark in LoDo wearing orange jerseys.

Hey, y’all. The only orange welcome at an athletic stadium in these parts is Broncos orange.

Don’t mess with us on this, Texas.