From today's espn.com game recap:
This was the final game as Minnesota's official scorer for Tom Mee, the first employee hired by the organization when the franchise moved from Washington before the 1961 season. Mee worked in public relations and became official scorer in 1991.
By all accounts that I've heard, Tom Mee is a great guy, and I wish him well in retirement, or whatever it is he plans to do now. It's pretty cool that the boys were able to send him off on a 3-game sweep of the White Sox, too.
However, over the last couple of seasons, he's made some head-scratching scoring decisions. It'll be interesting to see how the new guy handles the job.
Hee, hee!
Mee worked for the Twins for almost 47 years, so what an organizational soldier, but yes he had seemingly forgot what an error is.
Tom's grandsons went to high school with me (one nof them, Mike Mee is now a senior on the U's team) and I talked baseball with him a few times at the Little League field. Back in the early years of the team, the official scorer position rotated among the beat reporters at the PiP and STrib. I can understand making that position impartial because imagine a reporter trying to get a quote out of FOTF after a questionable scoring decision.
I think that Howard Sinker did some official scoring now that you mention it.
It really is a pretty thankless job. Beat writers haven't been official scorekeepers since 1980, when teams began contracting the job out because editors felt it was a conflict of interest. It's also not an easy job to land, since you pretty much have to have a good "in" with the team to even be considered. And the pay isn't so great either, around $135 per game, or just over $11,000 per year if you work all of a team's home games. But can you imagine the pressure on Mee during the last game of last season when Mauer was battling for the batting title with Jeter and Cano? Fortunately for him there were no close calls that day, but I'll bet he was pretty aware of what was at stake.
I'm sure it's a pretty thankless job, with guys like me complaining about this decision and that decision, whereas basically no one's going to say: "great job, your scoring that game was phenomenal."
It also has to be frustrating to have to make decisions on what is or what isn't an error. I'm sure Tom Mee knows that it's better for Barlett to reach a ball (that Castro never would have reached) and bobble it, then to let it go into centerfield; thus, he wants to reward great efforts by not giving out errors whenever possible. But then, he also has to consider not punishing the pitcher, who doesn't want to see his E.R.A. go up. Basically, if you award an error, you risk lowering someone's next contract. That's gotta suck
On the radio, John Gordon simply said that it was Tom Mee's last game until September, that Mee was going to go to some lake for the summer (I've heard you have a few of those in Minnesota) but would be back. So he may not be done yet.