Ty France And The Padres Thwarted By Good Old Reality

Ty France talks like a guy who is pretty sure he’d socked a game-winning dinger. “I stood there and watched it, and it was going,” France said Saturday, of his ninth-inning moonshot. “It was staying fair.” The ball did, in fact, stay fair: Soaring down the left field line, France’s fly bonked off a roof cable and dropped, well inside fair territory and directly into the glove of Milwaukee’s Jackson Chourio, for San Diego’s second out of the ninth inning.

France stood in disbelief, peering and pointing at the approximate spot where his heroic moment was thwarted by an impermeable ceiling. The umpires got together, discussed the stadium’s ground rules, and came to a pretty quick conclusion: The ball was fair when it bonked, and thus in play when it fell, and Chourio caught it, and France was out. The Padres went on to lose, 3–2. Sorry.