Umpire Hunter Wendelstedt Rang Up Yankees Batter Trent Grisham on Strike Two, and It Was Not Even a Strike
Home plate umpire Hunter Wendelstedt handed the Yankees and Blue Jays a moment they will replay in every umpire highlight reel for the next decade.
In the top of the first inning of Sunday’s game in Toronto, Trent Grisham was in the box facing a 1-1 count against Blue Jays starter Dylan Cease. Cease dropped a curveball, Wendelstedt enthusiastically punched Grisham out, and Grisham just kind of stared. Because it was strike two.
Not the third strike. Not close to the third strike. Strike two.
How Bad Was the Call
Wendelstedt realized his mistake almost immediately and quietly corrected the count. That is the good news. The bad news is that the pitch he punched Grisham out on was not actually a strike either. So he lost track of the count and he missed the location. That is a full house of umpiring problems in a single moment.
Grisham had already burned one of his replay challenges earlier in the at-bat, so he did not want to risk challenging again and finishing the plate appearance with nothing. He wound up striking out swinging on the actual third pitch anyway, which somehow makes this even funnier.
Wendelstedt has been an MLB umpire since 1998. That is 28 years of professional experience. This was not a rookie mistake. He simply lost the count.
The Yankees Will Take It
If you are a Yankees fan, this is the version of a Wendelstedt game you can live with. The last time Wendelstedt made major headlines in a Yankees game, he ejected manager Aaron Boone for something Boone never actually said. Compared to that, an early rung-up call in the first inning is nothing.
The bigger issue is what this keeps exposing about MLB umpiring. The league added the challenge system specifically to reduce these situations. It works when a call is clearly wrong. It cannot fix a home plate umpire losing his place in the count. That is a human error that no technology solves.
The ABS Debate Just Got New Fuel
Every one of these viral umpire moments pushes MLB one step closer to full automated ball-strike calling. The Automated Ball-Strike System has been tested in the minors and used sparingly at the big-league level. Fans want it now. Players are mixed. Umpires obviously want to keep their jobs.
Moments like this Wendelstedt punchout make the case for the players and the fans, not the umpires. When a 28-year veteran cannot keep track of the count, the argument for keeping human strike calls in place gets weaker by the pitch.
Wendelstedt will survive this. The Yankees survived this. Grisham survived this. But the debate around modernizing the strike zone is going to keep gaining steam every time something like this happens, and it is going to keep happening as long as humans are the ones counting.
For now, chalk this one up as a first-inning oddity in the middle of a pennant race and move on. If you are a Blue Jays fan, you can even claim the umpire was rooting for you. Yankees fans will call that a stretch.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
