BRADENTON, Fla. — Welcome to spring training, where the rules are made up and the games do not matter.
The Orioles and Pittsburgh Pirates played the bottom of the ninth inning of Tuesday’s exhibition at LECOM Field without umpires. The half-inning was unofficial, as the top of the ninth ended with Baltimore, the road team, losing 7-4. In a typical game, the bottom of the ninth would not need to be played, but because this is spring training, the Orioles had another pitcher they wanted to make sure got his work in and thus asked the Pirates to play another three outs.
The umpiring crew was uninterested in being involved, Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said.
“We were told by the league that we could clear it by the umpires and pitch the bottom half of the ninth inning,” Hyde said, “and I guess [crew chief] Chad Fairchild felt that we couldn’t.”
Umpires are under no requirement to take part in any unofficial play. As Baltimore right-hander Ofreidy Gómez and his teammates took the field, the umpires left it.
Without an umpire behind home plate, Hyde and Pirates manager Derek Shelton agreed to have catcher Maverick Handley call balls and strikes. The practice of a catcher having that responsibility is common in spring for live batting sessions between one team’s own hitters and pitchers but rarely seen when players in different uniforms are facing each other.
“A little backfield action,” Hyde said.
The LECOM Park scoreboard featured an image of the Pirates logo with a background of palm trees, featuring no information on who was pitching or hitting, the count, or the number of outs. The pitch clock, a new rule this season to improve pace of play, was turned off.
A handful of Orioles executives who had gone into the team’s visiting clubhouse after the top of the ninth returned to the stands, as surprised as the fans who initially headed to the exits.
The Pirates’ television broadcast was also caught off guard, with Joe Block and Neil Walker discussing their takeaways from the 8 1/2-inning game as players for both teams meandered in their respective dugouts. Then, Baltimore’s Daz Cameron began to run out to center field, marking the beginning of a half-inning that will never appear in a box score. Gómez retired three of the four Pirates he faced, allowing a single that Block noted “won’t count in the games that don’t count.” On the first pitch of that same at-bat, Handley framed a borderline outside pitch, and after throwing the ball back to Gómez, he deemed it a strike.
The inning ended on a ground ball to third. Josh Lester threw across to first baseman Curtis Terry, and although no one was there to officially rule Jason Delay out, everyone accepted it as fact.
Only in spring training.
