Lasorda’s Not Down, but He’s Out of 6-3 Loss

The baseball season is less than a week old, and Dodger Manager Tommy Lasorda has already been ejected from his first game for arguing with a replacement umpire.

Lasorda was tossed from Sunday’s 6-3 loss to the Atlanta Braves at Dodger Stadium after getting into an argument with first base umpire Wade Ford in the top of the seventh inning.

Lasorda bounded out of the dugout after Brave left fielder Mike Kelly went to third on a two-base throwing error by catcher Carlos Hernandez, who hit Kelly in the rear end after fielding his dribbler in front of the plate. Lasorda argued that Kelly was running inside the foul line.

“I think a high school umpire could have called that,” Lasorda fumed. “What’s so difficult about that call? All you have to do is look. If he’s not blind, he can see it. It was a terrible, terrible call. They didn’t call it and it changed the game around.

“If the guy is running inside that white line, he’s automatically out. The whole world saw that he was running inside the line. That’s the rule, and it’s been called 99 out of 100 times. You cannot run inside that line. Every umpire in baseball knows that.”

Lasorda plans to send a tape of the play to the league office. Television replays seemed to support his case.

“I want them to see why I was ejected from the game and why an umpire would miss a play like that,” Lasorda said. “This is not a judgment play. All he has to do is see where the guy is running.”

Ford, a Texas state trooper from Austin who has umpired Southwest Conference games for 24 years, said he believes his ejection of Lasorda will bring replacement umpires unwanted attention.

“The whole media attention has been off us,” Ford said. “The focus has been on other things that went wrong. Today the press, ESPN and CNN will report that we missed a call and possibly ran Tommy Lasorda.

“The fact is I never saw that call. I’m watching for out or safe, so that will get blown out of proportion too. They’re some things we’ve done right, and we’ve made some mistakes cumulatively across the nation because we don’t have the experience that the big league guys have. They need to be here and they deserve a raise. I hope they get back as soon as they can.”

The call was the responsibility of home plate umpire Bill Rosenberry.

“I thought maybe by asking the guy out on the bases, he might tell him (the home plate umpire) and try to help him (the home plate umpire),” Lasorda said. “But (Ford) said he was worried about the guy being safe or out.”

Said Rosenberry, also a college umpire: “I thought he had one (foot) in and one out. . . . That’s it.”

Lasorda may have lost the argument, but he won over the crowd of 40,785, which gave him a standing ovation as he strolled off the field.

“When there’s something borderline like that, they’re going to test us because they don’t know us,” Ford said of managers in general.

The disputed play propelled the Dodgers to their second consecutive loss. “It was a brutal call,” Dodger first baseman Eric Karros said. “The home plate umpire completely missed that. It wasn’t like it was something where it was questionable. The guy was blatantly on the grass at one point. If he would have been just a little bit inside the line, then maybe you can understand. There’s no way that the regular (umpires) would have missed that. They’d have called that thing like that.”

Leading, 3-2, at the time, the Braves scored twice after Kelly reached third.

Center fielder Marquis Grissom singled off reliever Greg Hansell, scoring Kelly for a 4-2 Atlanta lead, and third baseman Chipper Jones doubled in Grissom to make it 5-2.

Dodger center fielder Raul Mondesi contributed another splendid performance, going three for four. Mondesi, who extended his hitting streak to five consecutive games, hit his third homer and singled in two runs. He is hitting .526 (10 for 19) with nine runs, three doubles and seven RBIs.

Karros extended his hitting streak to five games by going three for four and he drove in a run.

Dodger starter Ramon Martinez, who allowed two runs on five hits in last week’s season-opening victory over the Florida Marlins, wasn’t nearly as effective in his second start, giving up three runs on four hits with only one strikeout in six innings before he was lifted for Hansell in the seventh.