Miami Marlins hitting coach Barry Bonds was ejected from this afternoon’s Giants-Marlins game for arguing balls and strikes. It happened after Chris Johnson was called out on strikes to end the sixth inning. Bonds confronted home plate umpire Cory Blaser and was pretty darn animated in doing so, wagging his finger in the ump’s face and everything.
When it happened I and many others immediately joked on Twitter that, hey, if it’s a matter of the strike zone, it’s hard to find a better authority than Barry Bonds. But it’s also the case that Bonds was correct:
The man has his flaws, but if he says something was a ball, it was probably a ball.
This marks Bonds’ first ejection from a game since August 4, 2006. Despite his notoriously prickly reputation from back in the day, I don’t recall him being ejected very much during his career. Maybe because even the umps knew that if he complained about a pitch, he was probably right.
