Quote:
Originally Posted by Scott Garner
The HP umpire plays a big role in controlling the game balls from a particular game.
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How?
Once a ball is taken out of play it's dead.
The only "control" I can think of is when the umpire reaches into his pocket to put a new ball in play. And "control" is an extreme word in this context, because the ball is randomly chosen from all the baseballs in his pocket. It's not like he pulls a ball, decides he doesn't like it, pulls another ball and tosses
that one to the pitcher, then puts the rejected ball back in his pocket.
(At the risk of undermining my own point, I suppose the umpire could "legitimately" not like a particular ball because he feels it's defective for some reason. But in that case, he'd toss the defective ball to the batboy, right?)