"That's where you draw the line," Baylor said of the forearm. "It's a cheap shot. A forearm is not part of it. If he had run over him, knocked him down, no one would have said a thing. A forearm is different."

Belle was at first base because he had been hit with a pitch. "When I got hit with pitches," Baylor said by telephone from Pittsburgh, "I'm thinking, 'Now I have to get a middle infielder.' But I didn't think about hitting a guy in the throat with a forearm, just sliding hard."

Baylor offered a test to determine Belle's intent on the play and the reaction it should have provoked.

"It depends on who the person is," he said. "If he was an aggressive slider into second base breaking up double plays, Frank Robinson or Curt Blefary or Hal McRae or myself, it probably would be no big deal. But he is not a guy known to break up any double plays. Albert Belle does not have the reputation for running down there and sliding into guys. If he did, he wouldn't be criticized for some of the most routine things."

Belle, Baylor noted, had an opportunity to break up a double play earlier in the same game in the very same circumstance and didn't run into Vina.

"The mistake he made is he didn't do it the first time," Baylor said. "Any time I slid into a guy hard to break up a double play, I did it in the first or second inning, so when you come back the second time he's going to get out of there."

McRae, a coach with the Reds and as intimidating a base runner as baseball has had in the past 25 years, was reluctant to criticize Belle.