Caleb Ferguson stood at his locker and said what a man who’s been around the game long enough ought to say: he was wrong, and he knew it before anybody told him.
The Cincinnati Reds reliever apologized to umpire Bill Miller on Tuesday for the expletive-laced comments he fired at the veteran crew chief during Monday night’s loss to the Seattle Mariners — comments the broadcast microphones caught clean as a whistle, including a crack about Miller’s size that had no business leaving anyone’s mouth.
“Don’t feel great about it for sure,” Ferguson said. “Definitely pretty uncharacteristic for myself. As long as I have been in this game I don’t know if you will find a clip of me going at an umpire like that. Definitely going to have to wear that one on the chest.”
He said he planned to seek out Miller in person. “Going to try to at some point. Definitely make it right with him cause very unprofessional on my part.”
Here’s how the whole thing got rolling, and it’s a textbook lesson in how a bad inning snowballs into something uglier. Ferguson entered with two runners on and one out. The Reds chose to intentionally walk Dominic Canzone to load the bases — set up the force, conventional thinking, the kind of move that looks smart until it doesn’t. Seattle catcher Cal Raleigh made them pay for it immediately, launching a grand slam that put the Mariners up 7-0.
After Ferguson recorded an out, the play that lit the fuse happened. Miller, positioned behind the plate as he’s supposed to be, appeared to obstruct Reds infielder Edwin Arroyo from making a play on a ball in play. No additional runs crossed, but the inning stretched one batter longer than it should have. Ferguson eventually struck out Luke Raley to escape, but the damage — on the scoreboard and everywhere else — was already done.
His final line: two-thirds of an inning, three hits, two earned runs, a walk, and a strikeout. The film doesn’t lie.
Ferguson, to his credit, didn’t hide behind the frustration. He acknowledged that Miller wasn’t trying to be in the way — that umpires work to get out of the fielder’s path, and sometimes the geometry just doesn’t cooperate. “I know Bill’s doing his best to not be in his way in that situation, so I’ve got to be better on my part too,” he said.
That’s the part that separates a man who lost his cool for thirty seconds from a man who doesn’t know he lost it. Ferguson knows. He said he hoped to catch Miller before Tuesday’s game to deliver the apology face-to-face, not through a statement.
Nothing you can do with it now, he said. Just have to move on. He’s right about that much. You coach long enough, you see players blow their top and spend the next three days making it worse with excuses. Ferguson chose the other road. Won’t fix the grand slam or the line score, but it’s the closest thing to a clean play he made all night.