Task: Pos Tagging
Input (English): Sentence: At one point in the game when the skinny old man in suspenders who was acting as umpire got in the way of a thrown ball and took it painfully in the kidneys , he lay there unattended while players and spectators wrangled over whether the ball was `` dead '' or the base runners {{ were }} free to score . 
Word: were
Output (English): VERB