Tony Kemp's jumping catch at the left-field wall Tuesday was, for a while, the defining play of Game 3 in the Astros-Red Sox ALCS. The Houston outfielder's grab of Steve Pearce's third-inning drive helped to keep Boston from building a big early lead.
Boston eventually broke the game open in the eighth, so Kemp's play will now be remembered more for the debate over whether he caught the ball cleanly.
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Skeptics pointed to the TBS audio that sounded a lot like a ball clanging off the metal manual scoreboard below the Crawford Boxes at Minute Maid Park. Believers claimed Kemp's glove and/or body produced that sound.
(Kemp, for his part, was going with that after the game.)
"When the ball went in my glove and I caught it, it did hit the wall. But the ball was in my glove at the time," he said, per the Houston Chronicle.
The Red Sox were, of course, in the skeptics' camp and challenged the out call. Video review in New York upheld the ruling, which made Kemp a playoff star — for a couple hours, anyway.
