Baseball resists novelty and modern meddling, so it comes as little surprise that this season’s new playoff format—a single winner-take-all Wild Card game featuring the fourth and fifth best teams in each league—resulted in fiasco. Last night in Atlanta, the Braves were trailing the St. Louis Cardinals by three runs in the eighth inning when they appeared to load the bases with just one out, after an innocent-looking fly ball, hit by Andrelton Simmons, fell between the Cardinals’ shortstop and left fielder. It was a shocking error, and the crowd erupted deliriously at a seemingly dead rally extended—just the kind of frenzied excitement that Major League Baseball had been hoping for when it introduced this new playoff system. But then, as fans were still high-fiving each other in disbelief,cheap jordans free shipping, it became clear that Simmons had been called out by umpire Sam Holbrook, who cited one of the game’s most byzantine regulations, the , which states that a fly ball that could be “caught by an infielder with ordinary effort” is declared an automatic out “when first and second, or first, second and third bases are occupied, before two are out.” The rule seems odd, but makes good sense, as it is designed to prevent an infielder from purposely misplaying a fly ball in order to force a double play. In this case,cheap jordans, many analysts would argue that the umpire misapplied the rule, since the play required more than ordinary effort,cheap jordans, and trickery was impossible from that position in the outfield. A counter-argument, however, seemed just as likely: that it would have indeed been an ordinary out if the Cardinals’ fielders hadn’t screwed up.