Chris Sale has been doing the same leg hitch in his windup for 16 big league seasons. On Saturday at Yankee Stadium, home plate umpire Dan Merzel decided it was a balk, and the 37-year-old, 10-time All-Star lost it right there on the mound.
The situation: runner on 3rd, one out, a tight game against the Yankees. Sale started his delivery, hitched, and Merzel's arm shot up. That hitch sent Yankees baserunner Spencer Jones home with the go-ahead run without a pitch even being thrown. Sale sprinted off the mound to argue, got nowhere, and kept jawing at first-base umpire Dan Bellino even after Merzel walked away.
Sale absolutely lost it on Merzel after the balk call handed New York the lead.
Braves manager Walt Weiss came out to back his pitcher up and got himself tossed for his trouble, which tells you how seriously Atlanta took the call. Pitching analyst Rob Friedman broke down the actual mechanics frame by frame and basically sided with Sale — the specific rule at play is the hybrid windup rule, the same one that got David Price in trouble years back, and it hinges on whether a pitcher formally declares he's working from the windup for that particular hitter.
Friedman's point was pretty simple: Sale had declared windup for the previous batter but not this one, and umpires around the league have generally given pitchers leeway on exactly this kind of technicality for years. Merzel just didn't feel like extending it Saturday. Whether that's a correct-but-inconsistently-enforced call or an ump manufacturing a run out of thin air depends entirely on who you ask, and this one is going to get replayed on every baseball show for a week.
The balk wasn't even the only umpiring storyline of the day. Braves prospect-turned-Yankee George Lombard won back-to-back ABS challenge reviews against Sale earlier in the game to draw a walk, then flipped the script completely by going deep off him later on, adding real distance to New York's lead well after the balk had already flipped the game.
Yankees held on, 5-4, in a game that will be remembered less for the final score than for Merzel's whistle. For a guy who's thrown a hitch into his delivery for a decade and a half without it becoming a national story, Sale now has a very public referendum on it — and the next time he's on a mound with a runner on 3rd, every umpire in baseball is going to be watching that leg a little closer.