Cabrera, who is enjoying a renaissance at the plate, feels as if he's on his own island after feeling neglected. Cabrera personally called the press box May 3 in Toronto and Thursday at U.S. Cellular to express his displeasure over errors charged against him. Both calls were overturned, but Guillen reiterated he thought the phone calls were made for selfish reasons.
A quick peek at the calendar confirmed that I was at that very game, keeping score. What does my scoresheet look like? Let me show you. Direct your eyes to Lyle Overbay's second at bat of the game:
The code "FCE" stands for Fielder's Choice Error. In the fourth inning, with one and and Shannon Stewart on first, Lyle Overbay hit a ground ball up the middle to the shortstop's left (location code K130 - Cabrera would have been moving towards second base). They attempted to force Stewart at second and something went awry.
I couldn't tell for sure from simply looking at the scoresheet with my naked, and somewhat elderly, eye - but once I'd scanned it and zoomed in on the at bat in question, it's clear that I originally wrote FCE and then just 6t in the box for the fielding play, meaning error (throwing) on the shortstop; that I changed it to 64 (meaning the shortstop gets the assist, and the second baseman gets the error) sometime afterwards.
I seem to have added the explanatory word "muff," suggesting that the throw was there and the second baseman just dropped it. Which hardly seems right - the ball went far enough astray that Stewart advanced to third base, and Overbay ended up at second. I think the throw went into the outfield.
The Blue Jays PR people sit quite near the official scorer, for good and obvious reasons. And whenever an opposing fielder makes an error, unless the error was truly egregious, they will always check in with the official scorer, just to make sure he's certain that it couldn't have been scored a base hit for the Blue Jay batter. I haven't really seen it have much impact on the actual calls, but I have no doubt that the players expect them to try anyway. But the Jays people wouldn't have cared too much about this play. There was no way Overbay could get a hit out of this; there was no actual scoring error involved (which will get everyone yelling) - it was simply a judgement call as to which White Sox infielder was to be charged with the error.
So yeah. Orlando would have seen that he had been charged with the error, and called the White Sox PR guy in the press box between innings to throw Pablo Ozuna under the bus. The Sox PR guy would have said "OK, Orlando" and then dutifully trudged over to get the official scorer to look at the play again between innings. Which is quite clearly what happened. The official scorer decided that Cabrera was right, that the error was not his fault, and so the change was made and announced to one and all.
I suppose it is better to get it right, in the long run.
Speaking of errors, or at least people rethinking their original positions, Jeff Blair seems to go back a ways with Gary Carter. It doesn't seem to be a mutual admiration society (or possibly an extremely one-sided one). Blair's latest blog entry begins thus: