How the heck did he blow that call?!

During last week's playoff game at the $1.5 billion dollar Yankee Stadium, Joe Mauer of the Minnesota Twins hit an 11th-inning fly ball down the left-field line that landed clearly fair, a foot inside the line. As millions looked on, umpire Phil Cuzzi, who was standing just 10 feet away, fixed his eyes on the spot and gave his signal: Foul.

Phil Cuzzi knows what you were thinking. He was standing right there, barely 10 feet away, with an unobstructed view. He saw the ball curve down the left-field line and bounce. He is an umpire with decades of experience, working at the highest level in his sport. How the heck did he miss that call?!

Cuzzi had called it foul, negating a leadoff double, and he spent much of the next 24 hours trying to figure out what happened. Part of it, he thinks, was playing an unnatural position - baseball only uses umpires along the outfield foul lines in the postseason and for the All-Star Game.

"We're not used to playing that far down the line,” Cuzzi said. "The instant the ball is hit, we usually start running. I think I may have been looking too closely at it. I never had a feel for where the left fielder was on the play." (In other words, he was too close to the ball to make a call).

“Phil Cuzzi saw the ball as foul, called what he saw,” said the umpire crew chief, Tim Tschida, who acknowledged that the call was wrong after seeing a replay. “There’s a guy sitting over in the umpire’s dressing room right now that feels horrible.”

Not as horrible as my mom now feels for whipping my ass back in 1972 after the Southeastern USA Regional All-Star tournament. That's when I yelled out in total disbelief (for being called out) after clearly beating a throw to first base on an attempted bunt single, “What the &*#@ is wrong with you ump... you are blind as a bat!"

(See mom...it's true...they really are blind)...I knew I was safe on that call....