Longtime NL umpire Frank Pulli died due to complications from Parkinson’s disease. There’s a look at his life and career over at the New York Times.
One of my favorite things about him was the time he took it upon himself to get a call right by using a cameraman’s replay monitor to change a call of a Cliff Floyd hit from a double to a home run, which was the correct call. At the time the National League issued a statement saying that Pulli using replay was unacceptable and that “The integrity of the game requires that judgments be left to on-field personnel.” Lost in that statement was that Pulli was “on-field personnel” and was merely doing his best with all of the tools available to him to make the right call.
Now baseball is embarking on replay in which on-field personnel are only supposed to do such things if managers force them to with a challenge flag, effectively cutting off proactive moves like Pulli’s. What a shame.
