Buck Showalter incredulous about World Series Game 6 ruling

In an industry as vast as baseball, longtime manager Buck Showalter doesn’t think Game 6 of the World Series should’ve experienced a moment like it did in the ninth inning Friday — when Addison Barger’s ball veered toward and eventually got wedged under the left-center field wall.

That allowed Dodgers outfielder Justin Dean to raise both of his hands up, signaling that the ball was unplayable. The umpiring crew called — and then confirmed — the play was a ground-rule double.

That forced Myles Straw, on first base, to only advance to third instead of trying to score, which would’ve allowed the Blue Jays to trim their deficit to 3-2 against Los Angeles at Rogers Centre.

And Showalter, who last managed with the Mets during the 2023 season, thinks the final frame would’ve unfolded differently if that never happened.

“The Dodgers might win the whole World Series because a ball got stuck in the wedge,” Showalter said during a postgame appearance on “Foul Territory” on Friday. “We got a multi-billion dollar industry. Why can’t we get fields where [padding] goes all the way to the bottom, and that can’t happen? We probably got a tie ballgame if that ball doesn’t get wedged in there eventually in that inning.”

Showalter said that if Rogers Centre — or other venues around the league — were to host a concert or another event, sometimes they need to take the padding down and then put it back up.

But after seeing something like that happen in a high-stakes moment of a high-stakes game on the sport’s biggest stage, Showalter thought, “Wow, we shouldn’t have that as part of the elements.”

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From his spot in the dugout, though, Toronto infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa also claimed it didn’t seem like the ball was stuck in the wall, according to the Toronto Sun.

“I saw it,” Kiner-Falefa said, according to the outlet. “He got lucky they called it his way. You think of a tennis being stuck in a fence. It doesn’t move. It just sits there. That’s not what happened here. That ball was moving. Really, he got the call. But I don’t know if he deserved it.”

After umpires determined that Straw needed to stay at third and Barger needed to stay at second, though, the Blue Jays’ attempt at a comeback ended when Kiké Hernández managed to catch Andrés Giménez’s lofted ball and get Barger out at second for a game-ending double play.

That forced a winner-take-all Game 7 on Saturday, with Shohei Ohtani starting for the Dodgers against Max Scherzer for the Blue Jays.