John Schneider wasn’t happy with home plate umpire Mark Wegner on Monday.
The Toronto Blue Jays’ manager went out and had a long conversation with Wegner between innings early during Game 3 of the World Series at Dodger Stadium after a delayed strike call at the plate led to an awkward out in the second inning.
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Blue Jays infielder Bo Bichette was picked off at first base after he got stuck on the base path. Bichette, like the rest of the Blue Jays, thought a strike thrown to Daulton Varsho was called a ball. And in his defense, the pitch from Los Angeles Dodgers starter Tyler Glasnow was high.
While Wegner can be heard subtly yelling the strike call on the broadcast, which made the count 3-2, his hand was slow to make the signal. Varsho clearly thought it was a ball, which would have resulted in a walk and sent him to first. Had that been the case, Bichette would have gotten to walk to second.
But the chaos left Bichette to be tagged out quickly and helped the Dodgers get out of that inning unscathed.
“[It was a] very delayed call, pretty deliberate,” Schneider said on Fox an inning later. ”Just didn’t say anything, so Varsh assumed it was a ball, and Bo assumed. I just asked him, in this environment, can he be a little bit quicker or give a little more clarity so everyone kind of knows what’s going on.”
And since Varsho tossed his bat and started taking off his elbow brace, it’s hard to blame Bichette for being confused.
“I think he thought it was a ball,” Schneider said. “I think a runner’s assumption, obviously, is the umpire is telling Varsh that it was a ball for him to throw his bat like that. It’s a weird play. You don’t want that to come back and bite you, but you want to kind of let the players decide what’s going on.”
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That blunder likely cost the Blue Jays a run. Alejandro Kirk hit a single later in the inning that sent Varsho to third, which in theory would’ve scored Bichette had he still been on second. The Dodgers scored their first run of the night in the bottom half of that inning, thanks to a Teoscar Hernandez home run.
The Dodgers and Blue Jays entered Game 3 of the World Series tied 1-1 after splitting the first two games in Toronto. Dodgers star Freddie Freeman eventually hit a walk-off home run to end an 18-inning battle between the two teams, which matched the longest game in World Series history and gave the Dodgers a 2-1 series lead.