In the midst of what would otherwise have been a forgettable Saturday afternoon shutout loss to the Dodgers, Bill Miller’s umpiring crew took exception to a request from Aaron Nola that incensed Phillies manager Rob Thomson and led to an ejection.
With two outs in the top of the sixth inning and the Phillies down three runs, Nola threw out a baseball he was given and asked for a new one. He was cold. This particular crew felt Nola was throwing away balls as a tactic to game the pitch clock. They thought he was stalling.
Thomson came out to argue and was tossed. He got his money’s worth. He walked off the field to a thunderous standing ovation.
“We have regulations with the pitch clock,” Miller told a pool reporter after the game. “Obviously it’s very sensitive — when the pitch clock goes off, and whether or not people are going to circumvent the rules that are in place.
“Nola did a good job the first two to three innings. And then, as the game went on, he started to throw more and more balls out to where we felt he was trying to reset the clock, which is an attempt to circumvent the pitch clock regulations.
“It’s up to the umpire’s judgment if any player, at any time, is attempting to circumvent the pitch clock regulations.”
Miller listed one other example his crew dealt with this season with the Giants’ Alex Cobb.
Nola said he had not been warned about it once this year.
Thomson cited a rule that players can be called for a violation by causing a delay, but said, “It doesn’t specifically talk about throwing out baseballs. Baseballs are all different, they feel different in a pitcher’s hand, and plus sometimes they get slick in the bags after six or seven innings. Umpires sweat too. I was upset at the fact that they weren’t going to let him switch out the baseball.”
Pitchers have been asking for new baseballs forever. It’s nothing new. It’s only a topic now because, for the first season ever, pitchers have 15 seconds to deliver a pitch with the bases empty and 20 seconds with the bases occupied, otherwise they are penalized with an automatic ball.
“How fast do you really want the game?” Nola asked rhetorically.
“The balls are slick, you need to rub them up, just like every game. Sometimes they’re chalky, sometimes they’re slick, sometimes the seams are bigger than others, sometimes they’re smaller. It just depends. I don’t know how you’re supposed to slow the clock down when you’re in the wind-up. What am I going to do, step off? Sometimes you need to rub the baseball up to get a grip on it.”
This was a discretionary call by Miller and his crew, who said that one final instance from Nola led to the denial.
“The last thing — he caught the ball, he took two steps, he turned around, and said I need a new ball,” Miller said. “He never felt the ball until he took it out and wanted another one.”
Thomson and Nola both expressed skepticism over an umpire’s ability to assess, in the moment, whether a pitcher actually needs a new baseball or is attempting to buy himself more time.
“I don’t know how you can tell whether a guy is actually throwing out a baseball because he doesn’t like the feel of it or he’s trying to stall unless you’re a mind reader,” Thomson said.
The sixth-inning ordeal did not decide the game. Nola was out of the inning a pitch later. The Phillies lost, 9-0. He allowed three runs over his first six innings, was left out for the seventh, put three of four hitters on base and all three scored. The line was uglier than the start, but it was another outing in which Nola cruised early and then made too many mistakes.
“It got away from me,” he said.
Nola leads the majors in innings — no surprise there — but has a 4.60 ERA. He’s the only pitcher in the majors this season to allow a home run in 10 consecutive games.
“It’s kind of inconsistent,” he said. “Good start, bad start, good start, bad start, and so forth.”