Sox win 5-1 behind great performance by Dice-K. We'd be on a 5-game win streak if we hadn't blown two 6-run leads....

Don is really losing it. You know the red line that runs across the top of the Green Monster? A ball must clear it to be a home run. It's part of the face of the wall. Yet Don has been telling the audience today that a ball hitting the red line is a homer.

Cody Ross slammed one high off the wall, right off the red line. He was thrown out at second, but not before 2 runs scored giving the Sox a 3-1 lead. On the replay, Don starting saying how since the ball hit the line, Ross should have been credited with a home run.

Later in the game, they revisited the zoomed-in replay, and again Don insists it should have been called a homer. Obviously no one else at the network knows the rule either as they are cueing up these super-slow zoom shots of the ball hitting the line.

Wouldn't common sense at least tell these people that a ball off the wall in baseball isn't the same thing as a ball over the wall?

And didn't Don see a ball mere days ago that hit the TOP of the red line (not the facing/front like today) and was called a home run, and talk about how it shouldn't have been called a home run? Here's an article about the play, which I also wrote extensively about.

Simply put, the ball didn't clear the wall. Regardless of what lines are where, that's not a home run.

A few notes:

1. Yes, if a ball hits either of the vertical yellow lines (or to the right of them) in left-center and right-center field, that IS a home run. These lines are there since it's a flush wall, part of it being considered outside the field of play, part of it inside, due to Fenway's quirks. (You could easily move the lines a few inches to the left and say "ball must go to right of line" for consistency with the red horizontal line in left. But that's not really the point. In fact, maybe that's why they made the red line red. It's a different type of marker. It's just a barrier to provide ease in seeing if a ball hits above it or not.) The red line is at the top of a wall which does end at that point.

2. A check of the Red Sox web site reveals that the ground rules they use are from the freakin' 50s:

"Foul poles, screen poles and screen on top of left field fence are outside playing field."

The screen atop the left field fence was removed in favor of the Monster Seats about TEN YEARS AGO. Anyway, they neglect to mention the red line, so there isn't much documentation of it online.

3. The red line in general is kind of pointless. It's not like the ball can disappear behind it. The way to tell if a ball clears the Monster is...to just look at it. With replay available, there's certainly no need for that line. Maybe painting the ledge-back atop and set back from the wall all red would help, as umps could see any ball hitting red as gone. For now though, all you need to see is if the carom is coming from the wall itself, the top corner, the top, the back ledge, etc. Anything that would clear the wall if nothing was on top of or behind it is a homer. It's that simple. The one thing that's not clear is if a ball comes straight down from the sky and hits the top of the wall (technically "clearing" the red line) and bounces back onto the field. That should be in play, as it would be if it hits the top of any other wall in fair territory in the park. But here it would be called a homer since it cleared the red line.