Food For Thought: Angels vs. Boston Game #1.

Psychology is a funny thing. Lakers coach Phil Jackson is famous for calling out NBA refs in public, paying his fines, and then benefitting from the impact of calls going his way for a change. He is not the first coach in the NBA to do this, nor will he be the last. He just is, currently, the best.

Might we have seen something similar to this effect last night, but in baseball?

It is possible that when Scioscia called out the umps like that after game 2 of that series, he could have (intentially or accidentally) had an impact on the umps on the field in a pressure situation between these same two teams now. Normally Sosh just gives his goofy look of incredulity, or trots out and speaks forefully and shrugs his shoulders a lot and walks back to his spot inthe dugout. Maybe the Angels file a lot of complaints and maybe they submit lots of paperwork to the MLB office. Whatever. This team has a history of not getting the close calls, and especially at home where one might expect some home-field intimidation at play. In this respect, we have always felt a little 'soft' for my tastes.

But what happened after the umpiring debacle in Boston a few weeks ago was different. By orders of magnitude. Sosh himself made declarative statements in public that called out the umps. So one thing to consider is that after the last Halo visit to Fenway, where the Angels got jobbed and the umps got called out for succumbing to home field pressure and Red Sox bias, the umps last night may have been more than a little intimidated to fail in favor of the Angels.

Is that what we witnessed last night?

I know that the Angels did not benefit from those blown calls in their favor (this guy's incredible stretch notwithstanding), but I have never seen so many obviously bad calls in a single game. Ever. And I have never seen more than one close call go the Angels way in a game, much less multiple calls not even close. The umps were definitely NOT on their game, nor were they behaving to the level of anti-Halo bias we expected. Hell, even Joe West seemed to be calling a straight up game behind the plate.

So I wonder if something was inside the umps heads last night. And I also wonder if they are realizing that this morning, and we are not going to see a favorable call the balance of this series.