The Bottom of the Ninth

October 26, 1985. It’s the bottom of the ninth—isn’t it always?—and the visiting St. Louis Cardinals are up 1–0 on the Kansas City Royals. It’s Game 6 of the World Series, which the Cardinals lead three games to two. Jorge Orta, leading off the bottom half of the inning for the Royals, hits a ground ball on an 0–2 pitch that’s scooped up by St. Louis first baseman Jack Clark, who tosses the ball to Todd Worrell, the pitcher covering the bag. Worrell steps on the base before Orta reaches. The runner is out. Yet first-base umpire Don Denkinger doesn’t see it that way and signals Orta safe. Denkinger’s call is so notorious that it is often referred to, simply, as The Call. Some readers will remember watching it live. Others will have seen the replay. Everyone else should find the footage online before reading another word.

Jack Buck, the fabled Voice of the Cardinals for almost half a century, described what he saw for the radio audience: “Orta, leading off, swings and hits it to the right side, and the pitcher has to cover.” A disbelieving Buck repeated the umpire’s call to his broadcast partner, Sparky Anderson: “He is safe, safe, safe, and we’ll have an argument. Sparky, I think he was out … He had the base and he had the ball, man, what else—that’s the rule, isn’t it?”

The Cardinals, seemingly unnerved by the injustice, blew the game. St. Louis second baseman Tom Herr remembered, “You’re already under enough stress and tension. Now you have this happen. It kind of blows the lid off your emotional stability.” But a whole series of events had to unfold for Kansas City to win. With Orta on first, Royals power hitter Steve Balboni singled to left, making the most of a second chance at the plate after his pop-up in foul territory was misread and dropped by Clark (only recently converted from outfielder to first baseman). The Royals now had runners on first and second, but their momentum briefly stalled when Worrell fielded Jim Sundberg’s bunt and cut down the lead runner at third. Then everything started to fall apart again. Catcher Darrell Porter, appearing to get crossed up with Worrell on a slider, allowed a passed ball, and the runners advanced to second and third. With first base now open, the Cardinals intentionally walked Hal McCrae, Kansas City’s designated hitter. The next batter, Dane Iorg, singled to right, knocking in the tying and go-ahead runs, the latter scored by Sundberg, who beat a good throw from the right fielder and slid deftly into home beneath Porter’s tag. The Royals won 2–1 and went on to trounce the Cardinals 11–0 in Game 7 to win the series.

The 1985 Fall Classic, pitting cross-state rivals against each other, was billed as the I–70 or the Show-Me Series, and it really mattered in Missouri. In the wake of The Call, Denkinger received hundreds of ominous messages and letters. Someone even phoned his house in neighboring Iowa threatening to burn it down. Whether his mistake ultimately affected the outcome of the series became a matter of debate for the participants, too: “If that doesn’t happen,” McRae told reporters, “we probably don’t win.” Jamie Quirk, the Royals’ backup catcher, had a different reaction: “Other things happened, too. … Does a bad call mean you have to lose 11–0 in the next game?” Quirk’s rhetorical question implied that he didn’t want to be remembered as an accidental winner. Although they may readily acknowledge an instance of good fortune, most winners like to believe that they had something to do with their victory. If Orta is out, do the Cardinals win? Who can say? The correct call would have removed only the most egregious mistake from an equation full of mostly hidden variables. Quirk preferred to believe in his own agency rather than imagine himself dependent on what Leo Tolstoy called the unseen “laws of space, time, and cause.” Tolstoy proposed that for winners and losers, belief in autonomy is equally illusory. War and Peace advances a theory of historical causation in which even emperors are powerless: “Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements … acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it” (tr. by Louise and Aylmer Maude).

Following Denkinger’s mistake, Cardinals skipper Whitey Herzog charged out of the dugout to argue. These days, however, in the event of a bad call, a manager doesn’t have to get in the umpire’s face or kick dirt around or throw his cap. He doesn’t even have to leave the dugout. Instead, he puts his hands up to his ears signaling that he wants to challenge the play. Even though the manager has gotten the go-ahead from people in the clubhouse who have already reviewed the footage, challenges are still a bit of a gamble because “clear and convincing evidence” is needed to overturn a disputed call. Officials back at Replay Command Center in New York review the call from multiple angles, at regular speed and in slow motion, forward and back, over and over, until they are satisfied. Today, any call as unambiguously bad as The Call would quickly be corrected.

A manager gets a limited number of challenges per game; if a challenge is successful, he retains it for use later in the game. The list of situations subject to a manager’s challenge has been steadily expanding since 2008. In the 2026 season, with the introduction of an artificial-intelligence technology called the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System (ABS), players will be able to request a limited number of pitch reviews, too. “Considered a middle ground between so-called ‘robot umps’ that could call every ball and strike and the long-standing tradition of the natural human error that comes with human umps,” MLB.com’s Anthony Castrovince reported, ABS “gives teams the opportunity to request a quick review of some of the most important ball-strike calls in a given game.” How long will this “middle ground” between erring human and robot umpires last? It is not impossible to imagine a league that gradually cedes all umpiring to technology in a drive toward adjudicatory perfection.

Baseball fans are intolerant of certain kinds of imperfection, especially when their team loses. Umpires are hardly the only source of uncertainty in the game: broken bats, bad hops, and caught spikes can all disrupt design. Then there’s the weather, the lights, the nonstandard configuration and dimensions of a park itself. The odds were mighty slim, for example, in the bottom of the ninth in Game 6 of the 2025 World Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers, that a line drive hit by Toronto’s Addison Barger would become wedged at the base of the centerfield wall in the Rogers Centre, resulting in a dead ball. The runner who thought he’d scored on the play had to return to third base.