http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/01/sports/baseball/st-louis-cardinals-blown-call-umpires-wild-card.html 2016-09-30 16:51:20 Cardinals Get a Key Hit, and a Key (Blown) Call An umpiring goof gave the Cardinals a vital win. === In a playoff race, everything is magnified. Every key hit, every big defensive play, every vital strikeout. And every umpiring mistake. On Thursday night in St. Louis, the But under the ground rules of Busch Stadium, the hit should have been considered a ground-rule double. Which means that Carpenter should have been stopped at third. Nonetheless, the Cardinals poured onto the field, a full container of Gatorade was splashed in celebration and the home fans screamed in delight. The game was over. The Reds are 67-92 and far out of the race, but that didn’t stop Manager Bryan Price from being plenty annoyed. Price said later that the umpires had told him he had only 10 seconds to appeal. “Ten seconds isn’t enough in that situation,” he said on ESPN after the game. He said that communication with team officials upstairs was hampered because: “You can’t hear the phone. There’s no siren. There’s a ring you can hear if there’s no fan noise.” Because it appeared that the Cardinals had won on a game-ending hit, there was plenty of fan noise. Baseball’s rules Price left the dugout about 35 seconds after the play in search of the umpires. They had already departed. The umpiring crew could also have called for a review, but it did not. Why? Apparently because none of them suspected Molina’s ball had actually bounced over the top of the left-field wall. “In this situation, Bryan Price did not come up on the top step,” the crew chief Bill Miller told a pool reporter after the game. “We stayed there. I waited for my partners to come off the field. I looked into the dugout, the Cincinnati dugout, and Bryan Price made no eye contact with me whatsoever, and then after 30 seconds he finally realized, somebody must have told him, what had happened, and we were walking off the field.” With the win, the Cardinals stayed one game behind the San Francisco Giants for the second wild-card spot. Each team has three games to play. If the Cards do make the playoffs, a ground-rule double that wasn’t will always be a part of the lore.