Jerry Meals and the ‘worst call ever,’ 10 years later; MLB expansion draft history and more: Inside Baseball

The best umpires are almost anonymous. They assemble in a sweet spot where their longevity lends them name recognition among baseball fans, but their consistency and aversion to controversy keep them from being household names. That’s the space in which Jerry Meals existed for most his career before 1:50 a.m. July 27, 2011. That day, 10 years ago, Meals was mocked around the web (ESPN: We have a new worst call ever) and on the nightly news, with Diane Sawyer telling viewers, “I hope his optometrist is in for their appointment.”

“I’ve seen the play a million times now,” says former Pirates reliever Daniel McCutchen, who took the loss when Meals called the Braves’ Julio Lugo safe at home plate in the 19th inning. “Maybe once a month, someone will send me a TikTok of it. ‘Hey, this is you!’ I’m like, yeah, I remember.”

You’ve seen how the game ended. Here’s how it started. McCutchen arrived at Turner Field a few hours before first pitch and saw his name listed in red on the lineup card in the trainer’s room. That meant he wouldn’t pitch that night. McCutchen had pitched in seven of the Pirates’ previous nine games, and manager Clint Hurdle was worried about overuse. So, McCutchen had the day off. He skipped his pregame ice bath and trotted to the bullpen in sneakers.

The Pirates had entered the game tied for first place in the NL Central. The Braves were 15 games over .500 and second in the NL East. This was July, not October, but there was a sizzle in the air. The Pirates scored twice in the first inning, and rookie catcher Michael McKenry hit a solo shot in the second. Atlanta responded with three runs in the third, tying the score.

Then no one scored for the next 15 innings. Oh, there were chances. The Pirates put on the squeeze play in the ninth, but Atlanta pitched out and picked off McKenry at third base. The Braves left the bases loaded in the sixth and 12th. Pittsburgh stranded two runners in the 10th, 17th and 18th.

“It seemed like one of those never-ending games,” McKenry says. “Those games that end up going 14, 15 innings or more always end with a bang. Something happens. Maybe it’s an error. Maybe it’s a wild pitch. Maybe it’s a home run.”

Dale Scott was the third-base umpire that night. He flashed back to calling the home opener at Cleveland Stadium in 1992 — a 19-inning, 6 1/2 hour marathon — and how his legs went numb after a while. When Cleveland’s Mark Whiten struck out looking in the 17th inning and started to argue, Scott told him, “That pitch has been a strike for 17 innings, and it’s still a strike.”

“I hoped to God I’d never have to use that line again,” Scott recalls, laughing.

Around the 13th inning in Atlanta, Scott told Meals, “Now, don’t be trying to break my record.” In the bullpen, McCutchen — who’d almost been called on as a pinch runner earlier in the game — started to warm. Jason Grilli had covered three innings, while the Braves’ Cristhian Martínez was in the middle of throwing six scoreless. The game belonged to McCutchen. He hadn’t exceeded 52 pitches in any appearance that season. He’d fire 92 pitches that night, blanking the Braves for five innings to push the game to the 19th.

“I said, ‘We’re gonna win or we’re gonna lose with me. We don’t have any more pitching. I’ll just go,’” McCutchen says. “The ending of it sucked, and it still sucks, but it really was the most fun pitching I’ve ever had in my life. It was kind of no rules. Weren’t a whole lot of fans there at that point. You’re delirious because it’s so late at night. I kind of felt like I was playing backyard baseball — it just happened to be in the big leagues.”

Scott Proctor hadn’t expected to pitch, either, and he definitely hadn’t dreamed of driving in the winning run. The veteran Braves reliever had only four prior at-bats in the majors, and no hits. But there he was in the 19th, with one out and runners at second and third. After falling behind 0-2, Proctor pulled a grounder to third base. Pedro Álvarez gloved the ball and fired a strike to the plate. The ball beat the runner easily. Lugo slid. McKenry swiped the tag.

“It looked like an obvious out,” says Scott, the umpire. “But I’ve been around long enough to know that looks can be deceiving.”

McCutchen didn’t even notice Meals’ safe call. He was kneeling on the mound, pointing and yelling for McKenry to throw to first base. McCutchen, assuming Lugo was out, saw an inning-ending double play in the works. “No one really talked about it,” McCutchen said, “but (Proctor) fell out of the box. He faceplanted.” McKenry wasn’t listening. He was pleading with Meals.

“I was in ultimate shock,” McKenry says. “Never in a million years would I think that I have to hammer some guy that literally kind of runs into me and I tag him at the same time. … I remember some umpires told me later, ‘You should have just really gone in hard.’ That’s not my job. That may be my teammate next year. I don’t want him to know me as a complete jerk who hurt his knee for six weeks because I went in hard to make it easier for (umpires).”

The umpires walked off the field, barked at by Hurdle every step of the way, and into the cramped umpires’ room. The game was over after six hours and 39 minutes, a Turner Field record. Meals had gotten a good look live. He said he thought McKenry had “olé’d” Lugo and missed the tag. Watching replays, though, Meals saw that McKenry might have gotten Lugo on the leg. The other umpires weren’t sure. It looked like Lugo was out live. He should have been out. But was he? Did McKenry get Lugo’s pant leg? “I was surprised how not obvious it was on replay versus what I saw on the field,” Scott said.

The next morning, then-Pirates team president Frank Coonelly filed a formal complaint with the MLB commissioner’s office, saying Meals was a good umpire who “got this one wrong.” MLB agreed. MLB’s director of umpires Randy Marsh flew to Atlanta to meet with Meals. Joe Torre, the league’s executive VP for baseball operations, acknowledged that Meals had missed the call. Meals issued a statement saying the same. Before the game that night, Scott remembers, Hurdle shook Meals’ hand and said it was time to move on.

Some fans, however, refused to forgive and forget. Meals’ family reportedly received death threats. His phone number and home address in Salem, Ohio, were posted on the internet. While local authorities provided security at home, Meals — a native of Butler, Pa. — was stuck on the road, angry and concerned for his family. “He was a little bit deer-in-headlights after it blew up so bad,” Scott says. “None of us are really ready the first time something like that just explodes with such velocity that you just go, holy cow. It wasn’t a lot of fun.” (Attempts to reach Meals for this story were unsuccessful.)

Meals’ missed call, as well as Jim Joyce’s whopper a year earlier, increased demand for expanded replay. But in Meals’ case, it’s not completely clear if replay would have overturned the call, an argument illustrated in an installment of YouTuber Foolish Baseball’s series “Baseball Bits” about the Meals call. Scott recalls Rich Rieker, MLB’s director of umpire development, telling the crew, “You know what, if that was replayed, I think that stands.” That isn’t to say that McKenry missed the tag, but rather, under replay rules, there may not have been a camera angle offering definitive proof.

Another reason the “Jerry Meals game” lodged in the minds of many Pirates and Braves fans — beyond the fan carrying a tower of cups and the little girl screaming “Let’s Go Pirates” deep into the night — is that it precipitated the collapse of the 2011 Pirates. The Braves won the next game, in 10 innings, before dropping the series finale. Then the Pirates lost 10 games in a row. They ended the season 72-90. For years, fans heaped some of the blame on Meals. Prior to umpiring the 2013 NL wild-card game, Scott heard a fan on a megaphone say, “Even Jerry Meals can’t screw us up this time!”

“We kind of had this spark,” McCutchen says. “We’re Pittsburgh. We’ve been awful forever. And then we were playing really good.” He laughed. “I guess if it’s a boxer that’s not supposed to be hanging with the big dogs, then we got knocked down and never really got up again.”

Before a game later in the 2011 season, McKenry pulled aside Meals.

“I told him, ‘Hey, man. I’m not mad. You’re human. I’m human. We all make mistakes. To be honest, you called a great game that day. It was just one mistake, six and a half hours into a game,’” McKenry says. “The fact that he came out on national TV and said, ‘Hey, I messed up,’ that was cool to me. I think that’s something the world can learn from. We’re all going to make mistakes. We’re allowed to make mistakes. We have to have forgiveness, too.”

And the first pick is …

The Seattle Kraken expansion draft inspired a walk down memory lane for Tony Saunders, an avid Washington Capitals fan and season ticket-holder.

On Nov. 18, 1997, Saunders — then a 23-year-old Marlins left-hander who’d pitched in the World Series a month prior — was doing Christmas shopping at the mall when he got a call from Marlins executive John Boles. “Congratulations,” Boles said. Saunders was confused. Congratulations for what? Boles told him, “You were the first pick taken in the expansion draft.”

“I had no idea,” Saunders recalled last week. “Complete shock. Disbelief.”

Before the draft, Saunders had heard the Diamondbacks and Devil Rays were planning to target veterans in the expansion draft. Since the Marlins headed for a few rebuilding years, Saunders figured they’d protect a young starter like him. Evidently not. (The Marlins instead chose to protect veterans, then trade several of them after the draft.) So, Saunders was a Devil Ray.

Saunders actually had prior history with an expansion team. He signed with the Marlins out of Glen Burnie (Md.) High for $1,000 and a plane ticket in 1992, playing rookie ball for an organization that didn’t even have an MLB team or a full farm system until 1993. He cracked the Marlins rotation as a rookie in 1997 — alongside Kevin Brown, Al Leiter, Liván Hernández, Alex Fernandez and Pat Rapp — and had a 4.61 ERA over 21 starts. He started once against Atlanta in the NLCS, winning Game 3, and once against Cleveland in the World Series, losing Game 4. “I learned a lot real quick that year,” he said.

Saunders went to Tampa with a World Series ring and high hopes for his next stop. But his career would come to be defined by injury. Google his name and you’ll mostly find videos and articles about Saunders breaking his arm while throwing a fastball early in his second season with the Devil Rays. (Or don’t Google it.) Saunders returned later, only to have his humerus snap again in a rehab start. He was 26, and he wouldn’t throw another pitch in the majors.

“The way I explain it is, everyone understands the risk and the reward of being a professional athlete,” said Saunders, who had a 4.56 ERA in 61 MLB starts. “Injuries unfortunately are a part of every sport. Some are just worse than others. My injury was one of the worst ones to have. But at the end of the day, I was still able to be in the game for 11 years altogether. Coming out of school at 17 years old, not knowing much of anything, it didn’t turn out too bad for me.”

Last weekend, Saunders, now 47, played in an alumni softball game with Low-A Charleston with guys like Brian Jordan, Mike Bielecki and Ryan Klesko. They all have aches and pains these days. But Saunders’ arm felt just fine.

Trivia

Can you name any of the five active major leaguers who won bronze with Team USA at the 2008 Beijing Olympics? Answer at the end of the column.

Notable quotable

Quotable? Maybe not. But this moment was wonderful. Duane Kuiper has been away from the Giants broadcast booth since early June, undergoing chemotherapy for an undisclosed condition. He surprised Mike Krukow on Saturday.