My team isn't in this, so I can expend my effort sympathizing with the umpire, in this case Doug Eddings. Good work over a number of years in any profession can be forgotten in one unfortunate moment, one misstep.

That moment happened tonight for home plate umpire Eddings, who ruled that Angels catcher Josh Paul did not catch strike three in White Sox' catcher A.J. Pierzynski's 9th inning at-bat. Replays showed that Paul caught the ball. Pierzynski, though, after initially starting back to the dugout after he swung and missed to -- what most thought -- end the inning, decided he might as well run to first to see what happened. What happened was that Eddings, who had just made the arm motion indicating that Pierzynski was out, decided that the ball hit the ground.

Paul knew he had caught the ball. When catchers are not sure they have caught strike three, they merely reach out and tag the hitter, or make a leisurely toss to first. Paul did not do those things. He got up out of his crouch, started jogging toward his dugout, and rolled the ball to the mound. Inning over.

Except it wasn't. Pierzynski ended up on first, Pablo Ozuna pinch ran, and Joe Crede became the hero of a moment that no one will remember as heroic because of the fact that it should not have happened.

No umpire aspires for a Don Denkinger moment, just as no player aspires for a Bill Buckner (or Leon Durham) moment. That is what happened to Eddings tonight. The White Sox may have won the game eventually anyway, but it ended before it should have.

"Nomar Garciaparra rescued two women who had fallen into Boston Harbor, his uncle and a witness told the Boston Herald," reports the AP. "'A bunch of us came running over and sure enough, pulling the two girls from the water was Nomar,' [the witness] told the newspaper. 'It was crazy. Nomar was like jumping over walls to get to the girls and the other guy [Nomar's uncle] leaped off the balcony. It was unbelievable."