The New York Mets pretty well flattened the Philadelphia Phillies Monday night in Queens, in the first of an important three-game divisional series. The Phillies struck first, tagging wayward Mets starter Kodai Senga for runs in the first and third innings, but the Mets scored three in the bottom of the fourth and then kept on scoring. Plenty went wrong for the visitors, who are in no immediate danger of dropping out of first place in the NL East but still would like to beat the hell out of their longtime rivals and ruin their season. The Phillies failed to collect a single hit after the first batter of the fourth inning, they balked, they blew a rundown, they committed a couple errors, they plunked a couple of batters, and Bryce Harper cut off an outfield throw that looked like it might’ve beaten Mark Vientos to the plate by several hours. It was a messy performance.
Ricky Bottalico, dyspeptic studio analyst for NBC Sports Philadelphia, directed a portion of his postgame disgust at Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm. Bohm is a weird choice, judging by the box score: He had a two-out, two-run single in the third inning, and triggered a nice around-the-horn double play in the fourth, and was broadly fine. But Bottalico is mad at Bohm for non-baseball reasons: Bohm, you see, brought the game to a sudden halt in the top of the fifth inning, after grounding into a double play. Something had bothered him during his at-bat, and he made his complaints known as he strode huffily from the field. “What the fuck is that,” Bohm appeared to ask first base coach Paco Figueroa, gesturing toward the batter’s eye in center field. Bohm also griped to umpire Scott Barry, who looked around confusedly before conferencing with his fellows.
Here is the view from behind home plate, just moments after Bohm left the field. Can you spot it? The thing out there in the stands that unfairly caused Bohm to tap a grounder directly at Jeff McNeil?
Just at the right edge of the batter’s eye, a couple of feet up from the top of the outfield wall, there is a parabolic reflector mounted to a railing. It is a very small and innocuous thing, but it is nevertheless intruding into the batter’s eye, which after all is kept monochromatic and depopulated precisely so that batters will not be distracted while attempting to do a very difficult and occasionally dangerous thing. Enhance!
Barry stopped the game and started hunting around for someone to deal with the reflector. Another umpire jogged all the way out to the wall, stood there impotently staring at the device, and then jogged all the way back, presumably so that he could say to his colleagues, Yep, it’s out there. The two television crews weren’t sure who was responsible for this piece of equipment; SNY guessed initially (and incorrectly) that it might be the property of Turner, pre-installed ahead of Tuesday night’s national TBS broadcast. Hunting around through slow-motion frames of Bohm’s double-play grounder, the NBC Sports Philadelphia crew did eventually find some angles showing the reflector shining quite a bit of stadium light back toward the infield.
Eventually a member of the grounds crew appeared at the back of the batter’s eye, but then stood there as if waiting for complicated instructions. It had evidently not yet occurred to anyone that this distraction could be managed with a tarp, or even a sweatshirt. This dragged on. Finally, after a delay of about 11 minutes, a man in a blue Mets polo shirt marched down there, loosened a bracket with two quick turns of his wrist, and lowered the reflector below the line of the outfield wall, to the applause of the stadium crowd. The fix, in the end, took approximately five seconds.
This went from surreal to funny when it was confirmed later by NBC Sports Philadelphia that this parabolic reflector has been sitting in that same spot since at least 2017, or for longer than Alec Bohm has been in the major leagues. This is not to say that Bohm was wrong: If the stupid dish was shining light into his eyes on this night, and if that light was distracting him during his at-bat, it’s fine for him to mention it to an umpire. Bohm obviously had no way of knowing how the situation might be remedied, and no control over the process or outcome. He’s just the guy who said the thing.
On the other hand, Bohm was definitely not the only right-handed hitter to come to the plate in the game’s first four-plus innings. The NBC Sports Philadelphia studio fellows—a famously disagreeable bunch—consider this a strike against Bohm’s character. “Let’s talk about Alec Bohm over at third base,” said a seething Bottalico, who listed this incident third among his enumerated complaints about the team’s performance. “OK, Alec, you had a good defensive game, but what really kind of got to me: You caused a 19-minute delay on something that’s been there since at least 2017. We went back and checked. That exact same thing has been there since 2017. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter, this was an ugly game.”
Following Bohm’s complaint about the reflector and the ridiculous delay, the Phillies failed to put a single runner on base until Harrison Bader walked with one away in the top of the ninth inning, by which time the Mets had gone from three runs to 13. None of this was Bohm’s fault, exactly, but his team’s vibes aren’t great, the loss was ugly, and Philadelphia sports fans are who they are. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, yes, but it also collects all the muttered obscenities, and makes no fans along the way.