Good morning.

Here are several links from the past week that will make your Monday a bit more bearable:

‐Matt Snyder of CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball explains why an umpire-crew chief was suspended for screwing up a rules interpretation about a pitching change but another umpire was not, even though he blew an obvious home-run ball:

While it was obviously an egregious error, [Angel] Hernandez’s mistake was technically a judgment call – just like when Jim Joyce botched Armando Galarraga’s perfect game, just like the famous Don Denkinger call, just like Ron Kulpa’s botched call in Game 3 of the 2011 World Series and thousands of others.
Though Hernandez’s mistake was awful and pretty much everyone with a working set of eyes knows it, it was still under the umbrella of judgment calls. And Major League Baseball cannot — as much as we might emotionally want it to — get into the business of suspending umpires for making poor judgment calls. That’s a slippery slope from which the league would never recover. . . .
As an umpire, you cannot just pick and choose which rules to enforce.
That is why [Fieldin] Culbreth was suspended. His crew neglected to enforce a rule that is set in stone.

‐Baseball Nation’s Rob Neyer takes Boston Globe columnist Dave Shaughnessy to task for the latter’s PED-related comments about David Ortiz.

‐Alex Cobb (above) struck out 13 batters in 4 2/3 innings, the first time in the live-vall era that a pitcher has struck out that many batters without completing five innings. Meanwhile, rookie Shelby Miller (27) and veteran Adam Wainwright (13) combined over two games to retire 40 consecutive batters, tying a MLB record.

That’s it. Have a walk-off week!