Sevy, Yanks feel the pain of ump’s
Gleyber Torres yawned and rubbed his eyes. Gio Urshela sat in the dugout, staring absent-mindedly at an empty baseball field. “Patience” by Guns N’ Roses, a slow acoustic melody, bellowed from the Yankee Stadium speakers. Close to 50,000 fans shifted — lazily — in their seats. These were not the optics one expects during the fifth inning of a playoff game.
An inning prior, crew chief/ home-plate umpire Jeff Nelson was hit by a Martin Maldonado foul ball that ricocheted off his facemask. Catcher Gary Sanchez turned around and asked if Nelson was OK before a Yankees trainer ran out to check on him. Nelson looked shaken up, but he remained behind the plate to call the rest of the inning. It wasn’t until the top of the fifth when the bevy of umps gathered into a circle beside the first-base line to further examine Nelson.
After some deliberation, Nelson walked off the field and disappeared into the Yankees dugout. He was diagnosed with a concussion, the Yankees later announced.
The umpires shuffled around the diamond to account for Nelson’s departure. Second-base ump Kerwin Danley moved to home plate. Third-base ump Mark Carlon transitioned to second. Leftfield ump Marvin Hudson shifted to third, and his original post remained uninhabited for the rest of the game. Major League Baseball does not have a backup umpire in attendance for emergency situations such as the one that occurred in the
Yankees’ 4-1 loss to the
Astros in
ALCS Game
3 on Tuesday.
Tuesday’s delay raised the question: Does Major League Baseball need a spare umpire at the ballpark in case of an emergency? If that’s a huge and impractical ask for the demanding 162-game schedule, isn’t it necessary — at least — for the postseason? After Game 3’s events, the answer is, undoubtedly, yes.
That sequence of shifting umpires took almost 20 minutes to achieve, which was much longer than usual. Outfielders Brett Gardner, Aaron Judge and Aaron Hicks left the field from the closest exit and ambled into the bullpen. The infielders jogged back into the dugout and, soon, the field was completely barren.
One concludes new homeplate ump Danley was putting on his equipment during the lengthy delay. MLB also took time to approve the switch. But, after all was said and done, the prolonged suspension had an adverse impact on Yankees starter Luis Severino and Aaron Boone’s bullpen management.
Boone, similar to his 2018 postseason antics, tried to squeeze more outs from Severino by using him to start the fifth rather than going to his bullpen. It’s possible the Yankees skipper was thinking ahead to ALCS Game 4, a scheduled “bullpen day,’ and tried to save his relievers.