Plays That Matter: Ball four, bad news for Boston

Most of SportsCenter's top 10 plays are the same: defensive gems and walkoff home runs in baseball, sacks and touchdowns in football, thunderous dunks in basketball, and fights in hockey. In reality, the plays that decide a game are mundane occurrences, overlooked by commentators and forgotten in the annals of history.

Well I'm gonna stick up for the little guy. Here's the first installment of Plays That Matter, where I dissect the plays that decide the game but are absent from the next day's news. Case in point: Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester, umpire Tim Welke, and as bad a call as you'll ever see.

SITUATION: Yankees-Red Sox on Friday night. Bottom third, runners on second and third, one out, 3-0 Yanks. Lester had already surrendered two runs in the inning on a long home run from Alex Rodriguez, and now there were two runners in scoring position with one out. Up came the uber-patient Nick Swisher, who worked the count to 3-0 before Lester battled back to 3-2.

THE PLAY: Boston catcher Victor Martinez set up low and inside, and so did Welke, the home plate umpire, who crouched directly behind Martinez. Lester fired a perfect fastball that froze Swisher and smacked into Martinez's glove well inside the strike zone.

Only Welke didn't move. The 25-year veteran ump kept his hands at his sides, and Swisher trotted to first with a walk.

It's hard to underscore just how bad a call this was, but several slow-motion replays on YES -- from every angle -- gave me a pretty good idea. The pitch was at the top of the knees and literally right down the middle, a strike by at least two inches on every side. A visibly stunned Lester stared incredulously toward home plate, and you didn't need to be a lip-reader to see him say "Where the f--- was that?"

The only possible explanation I can think of is that Welke was fooled by the late movement on Lester's fastball. Martinez had set up over the inside corner but had to slide his glove toward the middle of the plate to catch the pitch. When he caught the ball, his glove kept moving toward the outside corner, making it hard to judge from behind where exactly he caught the ball. Maybe Welke was confused and decided to play it safe with no strike call. Otherwise, he had a temporary seizure or other mental lapse. Either way, it was one of the worst ball-strike calls I've ever seen.

WHY IT MATTERED: Lester's next pitch was a first-pitch fastball to Melky Cabrera, who lined a shot off Lester's right knee. Boston's ace crumpled to the ground in agony and was eventually helped off the field as Red Sox Nation held its collective breath. X-rays on the knee were negative, and Lester should be fine for the playoffs. But it may affect the way he pitches, and it almost was much, much worse.

If Welke punches out Swisher, there's two outs and a base open, and Lester doesn't feel obligated to groove a first-pitch fastball down the middle. No groove, no liner off the knee.

I'm going to cut off the naysayers right away. Yes, the above situation is hypothetical, and yes, you can't directly attribute one pitch to another. But it's a fact that Welke's blown call affected Lester's choice of pitch and location to Cabrera. It may not be a straight line, but it's too much to ignore.