ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- Rangers third baseman Michael Young was coy when asked whether he went around on a check swing in the fifth inning of Thursday's Game 2.

“Put it this way: If he had rung me up, I would not have argued,” Young said.

Young started to swing on a 2-2 pitch with two runners on and one out in the fifth. He appeared to go around on the replay, breaking his wrists enough to force the bat to come around slightly. But first base umpire Jerry Meals said Young did not go around. So the count went to 3-2 and Young blasted a fastball to center field for a 431-foot three-run homer. All of a sudden, a 2-0 game became a 5-0 game and the sellout crowd at Tropicana Field was left to boo and chant "replay, replay."

"Obviously, it's a judgement call," crew chief Tim Welke said after the game. "He felt it was close, but he felt he didn't go and that's what he said."

The call angered Joe Maddon enough that when he went to the mound to argue. He was ejected.

"For those of you that have been around us the last couple months, we've had several of those moments occur," Maddon said. "So this was a pretty big moment right there. I really thought he had been struck out, and obviously we could go to [Randy] Choate on the next hitter if that were the case but it didn't happen to turn out that way. So it's really hard to yell from the dugout. Nobody can hear you, so I had to go out to the mound to make my point."

For Young, it was his first postseason hit. And it came at a critical time. He hit a sinker that stayed up some.

"At that point, I wasn't thinking about doing anything too big," Young said. "I was thinking about focusing on the strike zone, wasn't thinking about doing too much, just trying to put the barrel on the ball and stay as short as I possibly could."

Darren Oliver said the entire team was happy for Young and added, "he should put that ball on a mantel some day."