Instant Replay

I finally got around to reading this article on si.com about the call that umpire Phil Cuzzi blew in Friday’s Yankees-Twins game.  I have to admit that I did not watch the game and didn’t know about the hullabaloo until I read this article.

I don’t think much of the fact Cuzzi was let go by Baseball as an ump back in 1993.  While I don’t have a lot of sympathy for former strike-breakers, any umpire can blow a call.  Even the best umpires blow calls occasionally, just as even the best hitters occasionally strike out.

What annoyed me more about the article was the old-school comments from managers Ron Gardenhire and Joe Girardi that MLB doesn’t need more replay.  They give the usual BS about the “human element” and all that, but I find it hard to see the upside of flat-out blown calls that could easily be reversed (and thus gotten right) by instant replay.

Girardi suggested that replay was great for questionable homerun calls, but that using it any more than that would take up too much time reviewing plays.  Of course, that’s a ridiculous argument because you could easily limit the challenges by giving each team only one challenge per game.  If they get the challenge right, they get another challenge.  If the call on the field was right, they don’t get any more challenges.

Replay would be most useful for homerun and fair/foul calls, like the one at issue in Friday’s game, because those are the calls that are most readily apparent whether they were right or wrong after review.  I think teams should also be able to challenge safe/out calls, but if you use the same standard as the NFL (replay must undisputably show call on the field was wrong), teams would quickly become very reticent about using their one challenge on safe/out calls.  At the major league level, these calls are almost always bang-bang plays, a lot of which could not easily be determined on replay to be “clearly wrong”.

Ron Gardenhire is quoted as saying that instant replay wouldn’t do him any good unless he had a headset and someone up in the booth watching the replays.  Of course, that’s also BS.  The players, coaches and managers watch the plays on the field as intently as the umpires, and they don’t hesitate for a moment to question the calls the umpires make that they think are wrong.  I mean, is Gardenhire the only manager in baseball who doesn’t leave the dugout to jaw with the umps when a close call goes against his team?

The only disadvantage of not having someone up in a booth watching is that you’d have to be more cautious about using your one-and-only challenge on a play you’re not sure the umps got wrong. I don’t see that as being a meaningful problem.

If you think even one challenge per game is too many, you could limit teams to 100 challenges per season, with no more than six used in any one week of the season.  Every single pitch is now tabulated and set down in writing, so it wouldn’t be hard to keep track of how many challenges a team uses over the course of a season.

There are only a few calls that I think should not be challengable on replay: (1) ball/strike calls — the strike zone is what the umpire says it is, and that’s the way it should stay, for the same reason that players and managers are not allowed to question ball/strike calls at all; (2) check swings — almost every check swing looks like the batter went around on slo-mo replay; it’s a case where the replay lies (one of my pet peeves is that on TV they never show the check-swing replay at normal speed; that’s the only way to see what the umpire saw and to tell whether or not the batter really went too far around); and (3) balk calls — again, it’s often hard to tell on replay whether a pitcher made a full stop or not; it’s a rarely called infraction, and I’d leave that one to the umps.