Twenty five years ago, one of the most memorable and controversial baseball games happened at Yankee Stadium. Tim Kurkjian, from ESPN The Magazine, explains.
I watched the game live. I knew what the umpires were doing as they laid the bat down next to home plate to measure how far up the bat the pine tar was. I was a third-year baseball umpire at the time, and suddenly, those umpires on television were doing something I had been instructed to do, and hoped I never had to do.
I was holding my three-month old daughter in my lap, feeding her from a bottle, as umpire Tim McLelland called George Brett out. I can remember thinking that if I wasn’t careful, I was going to drop her, because I was paying so much attention to the television. My heart was pounding.
The aftermath was just as emotional as the Pine Tar homerun. Should Brett have been called out, or not? It was the topic of conversation for the next several days. When AL President Lee MacPhail finally ruled that the home run would count, the debate raged again. I have felt, to this day, that MacPhail made the wrong decision. If the rule is on the books at the start of the game, you don’t decide after it is enforced that we don’t want the rule to be enforced. Wait until the end of the season and change it, if necessary, but you shouldn’t strike rules from the rule book in the middle of a game.
