Maybe it's the camera angle. I've worked plenty of games with this guy and never noticed anything too out of whack with his plate stance. He teaches plate mechanics at our local clinic and espouses the usual ASA "heel-toe/good GPA" philosophies. Plus, he works D-I college ball and was assigned to the Big Ten tournament this year. So his plate work must be...satisfactory.
This summer I finally had the chance to work games with the plate umpire, as well as U2 from this game, on separate occasions. Of course, I quizzed each about this play (keeping in mind that neither one of them made the obstruction call or made the base award).
Both agreed with the call. Each gave slightly different reasons as to why they did. I actually didn't fully agree with their reasoning, but wasn't trying to start a debate so kept that to myself.
One of them seemed to be taking what I've heard referred to in baseball as "post obstruction evidence" into account, instead of determining a base award at the moment the obstruction happened. He also wanted to give the runner the benefit of the doubt as to whether or not she would have scored- and may have tilted the balance too far in the runner's favor.
The other umpire made some weird excuse about "the runner wasn't trying to go back to third base, so we couldn't award her third". I just dropped it. We had four games to work together that day and I didn't want to start the day by pissing off my partner!
