That was my technique I used my whole career. "It wasn't like too many catchers who, it's 2 feet away and they pull it back in. "If you see the way I received the pitch, I just let my glove go to the movement of the ball," Hernandez told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2018.
To me, it looks like a good frame, and Hernandez was to that point in his career a slightly above-average framer, according to Baseball Prospectus' advanced metrics. Garcia says he saw Hernandez try to pull the ball back into the strike zone, which made him think it must have been low. The umpire, Garcia, says that whether or not the pitch was above the knees, San Diego's catcher, Carlos Hernandez, made it look low by framing it too aggressively. Story »ĭecades later, Langston and the rest of the Padres still feel the grievance. Which World Series is the best ever? Sam Miller judges all 116 Fall Classics. They outscored the Padres 21-8 in the Series after that pitch was called a ball. The next pitch was awful, Martinez hit a grand slam and the Yankees won the game and the Series in routs. "You've gotta be s-ting me," Padres manager Bruce Bochy mouthed when the camera cut to him in the dugout. Langston started to lean toward the dugout, the crowd froze, and, so too, did the umpire, Rich Garcia. It almost perfectly bisected the plate and was clearly high enough to be a called strike three. On a 2-2 pitch, the Padres' Mark Langston threw a fastball that paralyzed Martinez. Game 1 in New York was tied 5-5 when the Yankees' Tino Martinez batted in the seventh inning with the bases loaded. But the nice thing is they still got to walk away telling themselves that but for an unjust break, they might have won. They got slaughtered, existed to get slaughtered and are remembered primarily for their part in the slaughter. Mark Langston, 1998Īs much as you can ever say this in baseball, the Padres had no chance against the '98 Yankees. All of their World Series legacies are in some way complicated. Some failed utterly in the box score but helped reframe the Series/the sport/life. Some of these players were, arguably, as important as the Series MVPs, but they didn't get the same credit. We've been rewatching and revisiting World Series recently - our ultimate ranking of all 115 World Series came out earlier this month - and fell freshly in love with some of our favorite World Series performances. But while we all love clear, obvious heroes - the Aryas and the T'Challas, the Gibsons and the Bumgarners - it's often the unsung heroes, the background heroes and the complicated heroes who make a sprawling story sing. The World Series is a story, and stories produce heroes.