Instant Replay -----> Thursday

by JI on Aug 26, 2008 5:19 PM PDT Comment 61 comments

For now, video will be used only on so-called "boundary calls," such as determining whether fly balls went over the fence, whether potential home runs were fair or foul and whether there was fan interference on potential home runs.

Replay will go into use with three series scheduled to open Thursday: Philadelphia at the Chicago Cubs, Minnesota at Oakland and Texas at the Los Angeles Angels. For other games, replays will be available to umpires starting Friday.

Baseball officials wanted to avoid having a situation in the postseason where fans with access to televisions and viewers at home knew what the correct call was but the umpires on the field did not.

Leaving the dugout to argue a call following a replay will result in an automatic ejection. Replays of the boundary calls will not be shown on stadium video boards, MLB executive vice president for baseball operations Jimmie Lee Solomon said.

About fucking time.

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Why now?

The damage has already been done this season. I got 5 bucks that says this isn’t used once except in some weak ass national televised game where the call is barely in question to hype up the purpose of it.

5 bucks. Anybody want to take that bet?

Fans are typically idiots.

by The Typical Idiot Fan on Aug 26, 2008 6:01 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs

To work out the bugs in time for October.

by JI on Aug 26, 2008 6:10 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

About damn time

Now they just need to allow replay on all the calls on the field. Leave balls and strikes to the umps, though.

by OlSalty on Aug 26, 2008 10:32 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs

I agree.

I think I’ve seen one too many game taken away from the Mariners by questionable calls.

JI/Robert '08!

by Fin on Aug 26, 2008 10:44 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Balls and strikes are the thing umps do least well.

I want machines making those calls.

I like using semi-colons; they make me feel smart.

by Llewdor on Aug 27, 2008 9:42 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

pitch F/X is probably already good enough to do that.

by Matthew on Aug 27, 2008 10:38 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

I want lefties to stop getting those outside pitches called strikes.

It’s so irritating.

I like using semi-colons; they make me feel smart.

by Llewdor on Aug 27, 2008 10:55 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

They get fewer high and low strikes though to make up for it

It’s a different zone, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily unfair, provided you understand it as a hitter.

by Jeff on Aug 27, 2008 10:59 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

It's unfair because it doesn't match the freaking rulebook.

Lefties are expected to cover a wider zone, and because it’s shorter pitchers are less likely to get called strikes on breaking pitches.

I like using semi-colons; they make me feel smart.

by Llewdor on Aug 27, 2008 11:03 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

My complaint is actually based on the research.

I didn’t know the strike zone was called differently until I saw that chart the first time.

I like using semi-colons; they make me feel smart.

by Llewdor on Aug 27, 2008 11:04 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Someone must make it so

Unfortunately, the umps will fight it to the death for obvious reasons.

by Gomez on Aug 27, 2008 12:54 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Let's have out calls made by a machine, too.

Wire up the whole game with sensors like fencing.

I like using semi-colons; they make me feel smart.

by Llewdor on Aug 27, 2008 10:57 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Good for baseball.

I think all these slippery-slope arguments are nonsense. (The slippery slope is defined as a logical fallacy, so there.)

On homers and foul balls, I think this is great. How many times will this be used in a four-game series? Once? Probably zero? All this worry about increasing the length of games seems unwarranted. We’re leaving balls and strikes to the umps — as well as calls on the basepaths.

Shit, even John Kruk is in favor of this.

by Teej on Aug 26, 2008 11:01 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs

And my contention for the last two years has been that by removing the manager argument over a call

the extra time needed for replay is further marginalized. You might might might be talking about one extra minute per game on average. In exchange for getting the call right.

by Matthew on Aug 26, 2008 11:29 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Exactly.

Although I do kind of worry when they say the umpires will be removed from the field to see the replays. I imagine them walking a mile then taking an elevator up to some suite, then eating a mid-game meal while they talk about the call.

by Teej on Aug 26, 2008 11:47 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Kenny Rogers, defender of all that is good:

Detroit pitcher Kenny Rogers called the decision “a slap in the face of umpires that have been here for a long time” and said the decision might have been made because Alex Rodriguez lost a home run on a blown call May 21.

“It overshot the mark by far just because, what, in a Yankee game someone didn’t get a homer? Please. It’s happened thousands of times,” Rogers said. “That’s part of the game. It’s the beauty of the game. Mistakes are made.”

Says the guy who was caught with a “suspicious substance” by a dastardly camera that refused to conform to his old-school ways.

by Teej on Aug 26, 2008 11:49 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs

Also,

I like that Rogers thinks there’s some conspiracy to help the Yankees. Like one call on a home run IN MAY instigated the process all by itself.

Is there a single problem in baseball that isn’t Alex Rodriguez’s fault?

by Teej on Aug 26, 2008 11:58 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Steroids

by JI on Aug 27, 2008 12:11 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

No, he supplied them.

He actually made THG.

by Mariner John on Aug 27, 2008 12:15 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

He sweats HGH.

by HARRYP09 on Aug 27, 2008 1:02 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Cause of America's poverty? Crime rate? General malaise?

Alex Rodriguez.

by Gomez on Aug 27, 2008 8:23 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

I don't get how mistakes being part of the game is a good thing

In theory, shouldn’t we want the game to be as much about how the players actually perform as possible?

by Jeff on Aug 27, 2008 12:32 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

It pretty much the same as in any argument against change for the better.

by JI on Aug 27, 2008 10:31 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

But the human element makes the game what it is

I wouldn’t want the human element to be absent from any sport, much less baseball. Mistakes happen, they’re part of normal life, why shouldn’t they be part of sports? After all, if no baseball player ever made a mistake, the outcome of every game would be almost predeterminable (if that’s a word), because performance would be entirely predictable based on past results. Where’s the fun in that?

Nice Guys Finish Third - Hopelessly lost, but makin' good time.

by pdb on Aug 27, 2008 10:47 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Baseball players will always make mistakes

the team that makes the fewest mistakes will win. In a hypothetical world where baseball doesn’t have any umpires, there’s still more human error in the game than we know what to do with.

I’m terrified of a situation in which a critical game is decided by a bad call. Doesn’t that seem like the sort of thing against which we should protect?

by Jeff on Aug 27, 2008 10:54 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Yeah, it does.

but I’m not sure that I draw a distinction between the performance of players and the performance of umpires – I hold them both to the same standard, and if umpires blow a call, to me, that’s not terribly different from a player that’s usually a dead cert to crush a ball into the stands in a high-leverage situation popping one up behind the plate. Both are mistakes – the player didn’t INTEND to pop up, after all.

Bad calls happen; they don’t happen often, and knee-jerk panic about OMGWHATDOWEDO based on one situation can, and often does, lead to bad rule changes. Not saying you’re panicking, but most people take a single incident as an indictment of an entire system, and I’m not sure that’s the smart way to go.

Nice Guys Finish Third - Hopelessly lost, but makin' good time.

by pdb on Aug 27, 2008 11:04 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

You'd react different if you were on the wrong side

of the Worrell call, or the Tarasco call, or the Josh Paul call.

by JI on Aug 27, 2008 11:10 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Furthermore

I’m not interested in watching people umpire. I just don’t care. All I care about is getting the calls right.

by JI on Aug 27, 2008 11:27 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

No, I really wouldn't.

It doesn’t happen often enough to be a significant deterrent to my thinking.

Nice Guys Finish Third - Hopelessly lost, but makin' good time.

by pdb on Aug 27, 2008 12:20 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

I dunno

I watch a baseball game to see how my team fares against its opponent. The overwhelming majority of the time I don’t care about umpires, and I’ve always maintained that over a large enough sample questionable calls even out, but if I’m watching to see a direct competition between two parties, I’m not a big fan of leaving room for potentially significant error from a third. What’s the point?

I’ll take the Tangotiger approach. If baseball had for the duration of its history had a system in place wherein every call was made with 100% accuracy, would you want to change it?

by Jeff on Aug 27, 2008 11:13 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Depends on who defines what "accurate" is.

The problem with 100% accurate systems is that, in something as large as MLB, people (and when I say “people”, I mean fans, because presumably in such a scenario MLB would come to some consensus) will always disagree as to what “correct” means, when defining the call in question. Which seems to be pretty similar to the way it currently is. So why change it? As you say, it does tend to even out. And the frequency of “potentially significant error” is, admittedly without my looking it up, small enough that I don’t think it’s an issue. If these errors happened weekly, or every World Series, I’d probably be more of an agitator for change, but these things happen infrequently enough that I’m not that concerned about remedying it.

I guess my whole thing is, if you eliminate the third-party influence in baseball, why not eliminate it in all sports?

Nice Guys Finish Third - Hopelessly lost, but makin' good time.

by pdb on Aug 27, 2008 12:19 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

I'd like for it to be gone in all sports.

by Matthew on Aug 27, 2008 12:39 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

I think it would be a hell of a lot more difficult to implement in other sports

Baseball’s pretty cut and dry.

As far as the frequency argument is concerned – you’re absolutely right, bad calls very seldom end up meaning anything. But imagine the outrage if a World Series game were determined by, say, a trap that was ruled a catch. That, to me, seems like the sort of thing we should try to prevent before it happens.

by Jeff on Aug 27, 2008 12:48 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

If instant replay were always 100% conclusive, you'd convince me more

but for instant replay to work on things like trapped ball calls, stadia would have to employ twice as many cameras as they do now, just to cover any possible angle of any possible play.

Nice Guys Finish Third - Hopelessly lost, but makin' good time.

by pdb on Aug 27, 2008 1:09 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Given PITCHf/x I don't think camera installation would be much of an issue

by Jeff on Aug 27, 2008 1:11 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

This isn't based on one situation

This is based on decades of a repeated instance of similar situations.

by Gomez on Aug 27, 2008 12:56 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

But that's the thing

It’s not repeated often enough to cause any sustained outrage or anything – it flares up when something happens, then goes away utterly, not to be seen again until ESPN interviews Jeffrey Maier for the eleventybillionth time. It seems like this is a problem that doesn’t really need a drastic solution.

Nice Guys Finish Third - Hopelessly lost, but makin' good time.

by pdb on Aug 27, 2008 1:06 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Unfortunately(?), the only solution is drastic

It’s not like there’s an in-between possibility here. Either you trust umpires on everything or you don’t, and in the event of the latter, you have to go to the technology. That’s a pretty substantial change.

Personally, I think it would be worth it, just to prevent the next Jeffrey Maier. That was pretty stupid.

by Jeff on Aug 27, 2008 1:13 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs