Below are the quotes from Umpire Dan Iassogna after tonight’s game. Jordan McPherson of the Miami Herald served as the pool reporter.
What was the deciding factor that went into ejecting Pablo Lopez?
“So what we do as umpires we’re beat cops. We’re presented with a situation, we take in all the facts that we can, and then we make our decision, put it in a report and we send it upstairs. That’s what we do, and that’s what we did tonight. So tonight, we had a fastball that we, the four of us got together — and I don’t know if you realize this, but MLB changed our protocols a couple of years ago as far as how we deal with ejections. It used to be that it really rested a lot on the plate umpire, and the plate umpire would judge, ‘Hey, was that intentional or not?’ Now what we do is we all get together. It’s similar to the NBA where they get together and they discuss about a flagrant foul or not. So what we did was after the pitch was thrown, we made sure to restore order. So we got Acuna up the line and then we talked as a crew, about whether the pitch was intentional or not. That’s the only thing we decide. Is it intentional or not? We decided as a crew that, yes, it was intentional. And then we made the decision to eject the pitcher.”
What made you decide that it was intentional?
“There’s numerous things that go into it. Specifically, what type of pitch it is, where the pitch was, where it hit him. Those were our two main factors. You know it was a fastball. It was thrown directly at Acuna. And we felt it was intentional.”
Marlins manager Don Mattingly said you mentioned the past history between Acuna and the Marlins factored into the reason for the ejections. Is that true?
“I think if you followed baseball at all, you understand that there’s history between this team and Acuna specifically, but there was no heads up in place, no formal heads up in place for us prior to this game. And understand this to one of the other things that we’re tasked to do is to keep control of the game. And we felt, and I felt, that by ejecting the pitcher rather than putting a warning out, that would absolutely stop any retaliation or continuing to really start a beanball war throughout the game. And so we made the decision to eject. I ejected him, and we did not have a beanball war. Tonight, we had one ejection. We had one hit batter and we had an injection.”
After the ejection, a few Marlins players, manager Don Mattingly and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre Jr. came up to you and the umpiring crew to plead their cases. You gave them a fair amount of time to talk. Mattingly and Stottlemyre were ejected. Was there anything they could have said to overturn the ejection and what was the final straw that led to Mattingly and Stottlemyre also being ejected?
“I will be putting in my report what was exactly said. I completely understand, and we expected Don to come out of the dugout and if you saw, once I made the ejection, I walked over to Don and explained our reasoning to him. Mel actually ran out, and then was ejected when he got out there, I won’t tell you what the last straw was. I would never comment on what was specifically said during an argument, but it will be in my report and it will go into the office.
Do you anticipate this impacting the rest of the series? Could the teams be issued warnings ahead of time or anything of that nature?
“I’m confident we will — I mean I will talk to my higher ups, but I’m pretty confident that we’re not going to have warnings before a game. That rarely happens. What we’re tasked to do is keep the peace on tonight, for tonight’s game, and we felt like we handled it. And by taking the actions that we did with the ejection, we did not have a beanball war tonight. Tomorrow’s a new day. That’s the best part about baseball. Every day is a new day. Tomorrow’s a new day.
If it was anyone other than Ronald Acuna Jr. at the plate when the hit by pitch happened, do you envision things would have unfolded the way they did?
“It was Acuna. It happened early, but it was Acuna and, you know, we handled the situation that was presented to us tonight.”
