Fair is foul and foul is fair: Pole disputes are as old as the sport itself

Baltimore Orioles slugger Pete Alonso after joining the team earlier this year. Alonso thought he had swatted a go-ahead home run into the left-field seats in a recent game at Camden Yards in Baltimore. It looked that way on video, but umpires ruled that the drive did not stay inside the foul pole, leaving Alonso standing in the base path pleading, “That’s a fair ball.” (Reddit via r/orioles MLBOfficial)

By SAM BLUM and STEPHEN J. NESBITT / THE ATHLETIC

The baseball was beautifully struck, sending the crowd to its feet as it traced an arc above the outfield and disappeared over the fence. Some spectators swore they saw it graze the foul pole. So when the umpire ruled a foul ball, the crowd howled. The batter circling the bases stopped abruptly. A teammate barreled off the bench ready to tussle with the ump.

But the call stood.

It was May 6, 1887. Jim Whitney returned to the batter’s box, and his Washington Nationals played the rest of the game under protest. They lost, 2-1, to the Philadelphia Phillies. After the game, according to an article in The National Republican the next morning, angry fans surrounded the umpire “in a threatening manner, but wiser counsels prevailed, and, under the escort of two policemen, he was safely landed in the club house.”

In baseball, arguing over which side of the foul pole a fly ball flew is a dispute almost as old as the sport itself, from Whitney’s wallop 139 years ago to a similar controversy Wednesday night in Baltimore. Pete Alonso, an Orioles slugger, thought he had swatted a go-ahead home run 20 rows deep into the left-field seats at Camden Yards. And it looked that way on video, too. But umpires ruled that the drive did not stay inside the foul pole, leaving Alonso standing in the base path pleading, “That’s a fair ball.”

As Major League Baseball has embraced the technology age — adding replay review, pitch-calling devices, an automated ball-strike challenge system and cameras tracking each pitch, swing and biometric movement — it has not yet figured out how to accurately rule, in real time, on fly balls crossing above the foul pole.

“It takes one of those moments to be like, ‘Hey, maybe we should add something,’” Cleveland Guardians outfielder Steven Kwan said, contemplating a modern fix for a century-old problem. “If they can do it in tennis, I’m sure they can do it here. Unfortunately, you need one of those moments to make it a discussion. Maybe this is that.”

Orioles players raised a question Wednesday that quickly became a talking point across baseball. Why doesn’t MLB use Hawk-Eye technology — a system installed in stadiums that uses a series of cameras to provide precision tracking across various sports — to determine if home runs are fair or foul? The league already uses the tech for Statcast data. Why not further broaden its use?

“I know managers have talked about that at the winter meetings,” Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider said. “Every stadium has Hawk-Eye. It’s pretty easy to just shoot it up the foul pole. We’ve got a lot of technology, and we got ABS this far off the zone, and we can’t do that?”

The answer, however, might be that Hawk-Eye technology cannot accurately determine a fly ball’s exact flight path.

A league source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it would be an elongated process “to develop, test and install tech for this purpose,” and that, using the existing infrastructure, Hawk-Eye data above the foul pole is “unlikely to be accurate that far away from the field.”

That did not stop Alonso and Orioles manager Craig Albernaz from pointing out to reporters after Baltimore’s 5-3 loss on Wednesday that the hit tracker on the league-issued iPads in the home dugout showed Alonso’s long fly staying in fair territory.

“The system isn’t designed for those calls and doesn’t have multiple cameras focused on those areas,” the league source said. “Instead, the system uses a projection based on the data it collects from the first part of the ball’s flight to estimate the rest of its path.

“This doesn’t adequately account for things like wind. In addition, there would still be a margin of error.”

Umpires say that calls around the foul pole are among the toughest to get right. Multiple retired MLB umpires said the best sightline on down-the-line homers might be from second base, or the base opposite the ball’s flight path. Those umpires have a better view of whether the ball cut in front of or behind the pole. Yet it was third-base umpire Will Little tasked with making the call in Alonso’s at-bat.

There is yet another variable: the pole itself. Foul poles are not a uniform height across the majors. The league recommends teams have 90-foot poles, but that is not a requirement.

One former umpire, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships in the game, said many in his profession have long advocated for the foul pole to be at least 3 feet wide. The thinking is that making a judgment is easier, even if it doesn’t strike the pole.

“If you polled everybody, they’d say, ‘Make them wide. Make them 6 or 7 feet wide,’” the umpire said. “Baseball’s argument against it: People don’t want to sit behind a screen. And it’s like, the highest-priced tickets in the ballpark are behind a screen. Now there are screens everywhere.”

Ultimately, MLB might just decide that making a change is not worth the trouble. Controversial down-the-line home run calls are minimal to begin with, and most missed calls on those plays can be easily corrected on replay.

Some, like Alonso’s, are not so black and white. In Baltimore, umpires said the call on the field stood upon review, indicating that the replay crew in New York was unable to confirm its accuracy one way or the other. Even with the benefit of slow-motion replay and numerous camera angles, some situations stupefy. A ball can look fair in one replay and foul in the next depending on camera positioning.

“It seems odd to me that we don’t have cameras on foul poles,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “That’s the one thing that is not different in every ballpark.”

New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone acknowledged that while it’s natural to want to use every available tool to get calls right, it’s likely more complicated than a quick install that fixes everything.

“That’s a little above my pay grade,” Boone said.

Said Alonso, the aggrieved party in this controversy: “I feel like we could easily have a laser.”