by Sean Begin
The 2014 baseball season comes with a major shift in the way games are umpired: for the first time ever, instant replay will be used extensively throughout the game.
But three weeks into the season, it’s already facing major obstacles.
In a game between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees over the weekend, the Yankees Dean Anna was showed on the TV broadcast to have clearly been tagged out, even though the initial ruling was safe. But after Sox manager John Farrell challenged the call, instead of being overturned it was confirmed.
The next day, Farrell became the first manager in the major’s to be ejected from a game for arguing the results of instant replay review when Yankees first baseman Francisco Cervelli was called safe at first.
But after Saturday’s call, it’s hard not to agree with Farrell. Anna should have been out at second. After that game, an MLB official acknowledged that the Replay Operations Center in New York that handles all replay challenges did not have immediate access to all conclusive angles.
Wait, what?
How do multiple TV broadcast (I watched the game on the YES Network, but it was also broadcast on NESN and Fox Sports 1) immediately see a perfect angle showing Anna is out but the ROC doesn’t get it?
Is there some miscommunication between the providers of the footage (the channels broadcasting the game) and the ROC? Maybe someone just choked. Maybe they felt rushed to make a quick decision that they didn’t go through all available angles. Maybe it was simply technical difficulties.
None of that matters, though.
Replay in baseball has long been an issue of contention. Purists will argue that it takes the human element (umpires) out of the game. Proponents of the system, ironically, will argue the same point.
While I’m all for expanded replay (baseball added replay on home run calls in 2008) it’s becoming increasingly clear that patience on many levels is being worn thin.
These early months of replay are when it will be most scrutinized. Mistakes like the one in the Sox/Yankees game, or lengthy reviews like the four minute, 45 second one that took place in a game between Oakland and Cleveland earlier this season, will provide proof for the doubters that the system isn’t perfect yet.
But that’s precisely the point. John Schuerholz – former Braves manager and one of the minds behind replay – called 2014 the first year of a “three-year rollout” of expanded replay. Patience becomes necessary.
But for fans, managers and players patience isn’t always a strong suit. And with baseball already facing issues of game length (the average game length has gone up 30 minutes since the 1960s) there is no room for five minute reviews that come up “inconclusive.”
Now is the time for replay to show its usefulness. Through the first 141 games of the season (about two weeks), replay overturned a call once in every 6.7 games. Out of 64 challenges, 21 have been overturned with the average replay length 2:15. These are not bad numbers, even though the time can continue to be decreased.
And most of these early mistakes seem to be technical, which should be expected given the newness of the system. But the way replay is used still needs policing.
Managers have already shown that these new replay rules can be bent and twisted as strategy for giving bullpen pitchers more time to warm up without the struggling starter continuing to flounder, or will come out to talk with the umpires while they wait for the team’s new replay guy to determine if a challenge is necessary (which, of course, only adds to the length of a game).
Look, it’s not surprising there are kinks to the system. But some of these mistakes and issues have been so glaring that the people decrying replay as a failure will only get louder. Baseball should take some quick and necessary steps to shore up replay before those voices continue to grow.