Playoff Pulse: Ugly Umpiring Looms

Major League Baseball is fortunate the Angels' Game 1 win over the Red Sox was never in doubt after Torii Hunter's gargantuan fifth-inning blast. Hunter's home run and John Lackey's stellar pitching made it a moot point, but the umpiring was beyond brutal. First base umpire C.B. Bucknor was at the center of the storm, blowing two calls -- one in the fourth inning and one in the sixth -- that replays showed were clear outs for the Red Sox. The Angels also took exception to one of Bucknor's calls in the fifth, and while it's easy to make a target of an umpire who has been voted the worst in the league by the players on multiple occasions, the entire crew was poor on Thursday night.