On Baseball | Bowa sees bad basics

By now you've seen the annoying replay of Hanley Ramirez going five-hole on Rod Barajas about a gazillion times.

It was Wednesday night in Miami. The Phillies were one out away from beating the Florida Marlins in the bottom of the ninth inning. Ramirez was a dead duck. All Barajas had to do was block home plate Mike Scioscia-style and apply the tag. Game over.

You know what happened next. The image is painfully seared on your retina, right next to Ricky Watters' growing alligator arms in 1995. Instead of blocking the plate, Barajas stood straight up. Ramirez slid between his legs. Tie game. A moment later, Brett Myers was grabbing his shoulder, but that's another story.

The Phillies ended up winning Wednesday night's game, but the play involving their catcher got us to thinking about the decline of fundamentals in baseball, particularly the lost art of tagging.

"It drives me crazy," Larry Bowa said by telephone Friday.

Bowa, the former Phillies shortstop and manager who now coaches third base for the Yankees, won two Gold Gloves in his playing career and was a good tag man.

So what happened to the art of tagging?

"It disappeared because guys don't want to get hurt making a tag play," he said. "You've got to get down there. You've got to block the plate.

"Second basemen and shortstops take the ball in front of the bag and make sweep tags. That's not the way you're supposed to do it. You're supposed to straddle the bag, drop the glove down, make a good tag, and get it out of there. I think these days guys are afraid to get cut or spiked, so they sweep everything. What they don't realize is these sweep tags make it tough on the umpire. If you straddle the bag, you give the umpire a nice clear view."

Bowa saw the play involving Barajas and Ramirez on television after the Yankees game had ended that night. His immediate reaction?

"I thought he was out," Bowa said. "Ninety-nine times out of 100, the umpire calls him out there."

That's because over the last couple of decades or so, the decline of sound tagging fundamentals has coincided with umpires' taking the easy way out. If the throw beats the runner, many umpires call the runner out regardless of how the tag is executed.

It was even that way when Bowa played.

"I remember I slid into second once," he said. "The ball beat me, but the guy didn't tag me. I got up screaming. The umpire said, 'Look, Bo, 40,000 people saw the ball beat you. The TV [camera] saw the ball beat you. The other team saw the ball beat you. You're out.' "

Watching on television Wednesday night, Bowa saw leftfielder Jayson Werth's throw arrive well ahead of Ramirez. He assumed umpire Tim Timmons would automatically call Ramirez out.

But Timmons looked for something essential - a tag. It was soft, high and late, so he ruled Ramirez safe.

"On the replay, you could see he made the right call," Bowa said. "Good for him.

"I actually think more and more umpires are looking for good tags. It's really getting better. There are so many cameras now, the umpires are bearing down. You better tag him."

Bowa wasn't the only person in New York to see Timmons' call.

Mike Port, Major League Baseball's vice president in charge of umpiring, reviewed it the next morning. A report had been filed because Barajas and manager Charlie Manuel had been ejected.

"The ejections were my motivation for looking at the tape," Port said. "He got it right. Just because the ball beats the runner doesn't make him out. You're supposed to tag the runner."

Port, a former general manager of the Angels and longtime assistant GM with the Red Sox, is protective of his umpires. He would not directly say whether he had seen phantom tags over the years, though anyone who has watched as much baseball as him probably has.

Port did acknowledge that tag plays are not as fundamentally sound as they once were.

While Bowa says umpires are calling tags plays more precisely, Port says there had been no directive to have umpires do that.

"All that matters is getting the call right," he said.

Still, umpiring has changed since Major League Baseball took over governing umpires from the league offices, which were abolished in 2000. There is more consistency, more uniformity, more accountability, more communication.

In short, better umpiring.

Once upon a time, Hanley Ramirez might have been called out Wednesday night, and Barajas would have avoided the wrath of Phillies fans.

But Tim Timmons got the call right, and the clarion was sounded: Major-league players had better start paying attention to those tag plays.