The Yankees beat the Red Sox 16-1 on Sunday in the game that decided their season series, and somehow the funniest part of the whole afternoon is watching an entire fanbase decide a non-overturned replay review is the reason why. I’m a Yankees fan. I’m not going to pretend that watching Red Sox Twitter melt down over a call that barely mattered in a fifteen-run blowout isn’t the best part of my week, because it is, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise.
Here’s what actually happened, since apparently nobody screenshotting the replay angle wants to mention the score first: New York won the season series 7-6, and this game carried real tiebreaker weight for the AL East and wild card picture. The final was 16-1.
Say it a couple more times if you need to.
The play everyone’s mad about came in the fifth inning. Jazz Chisholm Jr. lifted a soft fly to center, Ceddanne Rafaela dove for it, and the throw to first looked, in real time, like a clean double play. The umpiring crew ruled no catch, the ball down.
Boston challenged, and per Yahoo Sports, the New York replay center upheld the on-field call even though the video looked like Rafaela had it secure before it touched grass. Chisholm stayed at first instead of being an out.
Two batters later, Paul Goldschmidt lined a two-run single, then Heliot Ramos put a three-run homer over the fence. Five runs in the inning, game gone. Red Sox pitcher Ranger Suárez called it a “game-changing play,” which is a real quote from a real professional athlete who then went out and allowed a five-run inning anyway, so make of that what you will.
None of this stopped the discourse machine. Fansided asked out loud whether the Yankees are “beating the bias allegations,” which is a real sentence someone got paid to publish about a call that changed a blowout from bad to slightly worse. Dave Portnoy, never one to let a boring truth get in the way of a louder one, posted his reaction within minutes:
https://twitter.com/stoolpresidente/status/2094139103755305091
To be fair to Portnoy for exactly one sentence: the call probably should’ve been an out, and nobody watching the replay closely thinks otherwise. But “the umpires are rigged” is a much easier tweet to write than “we got run off our own diamond by fifteen runs,” and the loudest reactions aren’t coming from people who rewatched the throw a dozen times. They’re coming from people who wanted a villain that wasn’t the final score, and @KutterIsKing wasn’t shy about picking one:
https://twitter.com/KutterIsKing/status/2094137874757083210
Earlier this year, the Red Sox swept the Yankees on a walk-off, and Boston correctly treated it as a signature win, no asterisks, no replay complaints. This is the same fanbase.
Wins get taken at face value.
A sixteen-run loss apparently needs a conspiracy theory to make it bearable, and I get the impulse — losing that badly to your biggest rival stings in a way a normal loss doesn’t — but a blown call in a five-run inning doesn’t explain a fifteen-run final, and everybody arguing about the review knows it.
It’s been a season of Chisholm getting called overrated next to Aaron Judge’s bat, and Sunday he became the center of the whole afternoon’s discourse on a play that ended with him standing on first base, not in a highlight reel. He didn’t need to hit a ball out of the park to matter. He just needed to not get thrown out, and Boston’s fanbase did the rest of the work for him.
Somewhere in Boston tonight, a group chat is arguing about umpire assignments instead of the bullpen.
