Girardi failed to do that Tuesday and he shouldered the blame.īut the league’s system is designed to automatically populate a team’s card with the correct active roster. In the end, it’s the club’s responsibility to ensure the correct names are on the card that the home-plate umpire is holding before first pitch. “It seems like there’s a better system that could probably be put in place,” Brewers manager Craig Counsell said. “My hope is that we could just print out our own cards and exchange them again,” Girardi said. Girardi is the fourth manager since last July to discover during a game that one of his players was ineligible - all of them a direct result of some type of digital disconnect. But Major League Baseball implemented a new system before the 2020 season to digitize the process. ![]() For virtually all of baseball history, the lineup card was a handwritten piece of cardboard, sketched personally by managers and coaches, then handed to the umpires minutes before the game. It draws attention only when a team bats out of order or when a manager mistakenly lists someone as both a fielder and a designated hitter. The lineup card is one of the more esoteric items at a ballpark. None of this was unusual, but it initiated a chain of events that resulted in De Los Santos not being eligible to pitch and an embarrassed Joe Girardi having to dig deeper into his bullpen to preserve a one-run win against the Brewers that probably didn’t need to be as stressful as it was.
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