Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 267: Why We’re Happy About Expanded Replay Review

Episode Date: August 16, 2013

Ben and Sam (mostly) celebrate the impending arrival of a new replay review system.

Ground ball to third, breaking for the plate, the throw, and they got him! No! He caught him safe! He caught him safe! Unbelievable! Jerry Meals caught him safe! The throw beat him by a mile! That is incredible! You've got to be kidding me, Jerry Meals! Good morning, and welcome to episode 267 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. Hi Ben.

Hello. So this is the instant replay edition of the podcast. We're just going to talk about that one topic. Do you have anything to say before we start to talk about that one topic. Do you have anything to say before we start to talk about that topic? About instant replay or about life or what? Yeah, life, other

instant replay related baseball topics. I'm eating a cookie. What kind? Chocolate chip. Always chocolate chip. Okay. Is that all all right banter done okay so uh the replay system do you do you want to summarize what the replay system is for the benefit of people who somehow haven't read about it but are listening to a baseball podcast anyway uh so as i understand it uh each manager can um can challenge um up to one play during the first six innings of a game if his challenge is upheld then he doesn't lose it so he could theoretically

challenge up to a million during the first six innings of play but he can only have one unsuccessful challenge in the first six innings he gets, but he can only have one unsuccessful challenge in the first six innings. He gets two challenges from innings seven on. The challenge will start a process by which the league's video guy who is in New York somewhere will have the video queued up and can watch the replay from multiple angles and then somehow relay his decision back to the umpires who will overturn or not overturn the play, with the exception of home run calls,

which will continue to be done in the strange, archaic way they are done now, and seemingly somewhat unsuccessful way that they're done now, which is interesting. As I saw it, it is grandfathered in, which weird because grandfathering and usually like refers to sort of protecting somebody's rights yeah and i'm not sure whose right is like are the umpires did you take that did you take that to mean that it will be preserved exactly as is like the umpires have to run into the tunnel and look at their little screen or it's just that the managers don't have to challenge uh or they can't challenge that it's an umpire it's an umpire decision but it will still go to the new york office well i would certainly like to i would i i'm now hoping hopefully

reconsidering and thinking that it is probably the latter i hope so yes. Yes. I was, I was imagining that I was actually imagining that for every home run challenge, uh, Angel Hernandez would be called, would be called in and then he would run and he would look on, uh, he would look on his flip phone that the video would be uploaded to his flip phone. Right. And then, and then he would come out and insult everybody. He wouldn't even give a rule. He would just call people names. That's going to be the process. And it's grandfathered in, so what can you do? Yeah.

And so the reviewable plays are pretty much everything except balls and strikes, it sounds like, and hit by pitches, whether batters were actually hit by them, which MLB says covers 89% of incorrect calls, which seems... See, I think that I read that slightly differently than you did. Okay. I read the hit by pitch exception as being an example of an exception, but not the extent of the exceptions.

Okay. Yeah, there are still details that we don't know. I thought that Sherholtz was just giving an example of why a particular one would be accepted. He gave the hit-by-pitch example because

basically it would create situations where it would be hard to place base runners and that's why I didn't think of that as an inclusive list. So we don't exactly know. And like Dan Brooks asked me if box would be an exception, and I think just to amuse me, but then I've been thinking about it a lot. Dan's got about a million details that he's thought about

and that he shared with me and that I'm going to share with you later. But we'll get to those. And there are still important things we don't know, like, I guess, like what happens after the ninth inning. Do you then get new reviews? No, it's the seventh inning on, right? The two are for the seventh inning on. So no matter how long the game goes? Because the way I read it was seven through nine

You get two And one through six you get one That's not how I heard it described I just heard Most of what I got was reporters relaying things to Bo Porter and Bob Melvin today and then asking them about it. So admittedly, I have somewhat secondhand information, although I like I think one of the guys who was asking him might have been the guy who wrote the MLB.com story. So it's not terrible information.

But yeah, I don't. My understanding was that it was it was specifically stated to Bo Porter that it was seventh inning. OK, yeah, I'm looking at that now. Duration of the game. Two challenges beginning in the seventh through the game's duration. OK, so so the first thing, I guess, to say, and we will, I'm sure, have some have some issues to take with the system but but the i mean you know the first thing to mention is probably that this is a huge improvement right i mean this is this is great over uh compared to what we have had so far it it could have been could have been worse uh i mean instant replay took

decades to be instituted in any fashion in baseball, and then it's been five years since home run replay review was instituted with no subsequent additions or improvements. So to have sounds like the vast majority of calls be reviewable as soon as next season is is exciting uh and i mean think about how many fewer incorrect calls there are going to be that's well that's fine that's happy ben i'm sure glad that you said that because the the response that i was picking up from like the world today yes from from people who have been clamoring for instant replay for so long was like

it just seemed so negative it was like going oh well yeah yeah that they removed the cancer but look at there's a scar you know it just it felt so weird how critical everybody was of it yeah and i was surprised because to me i mean you're not going to get it exactly like you want you i mean unless you are the commissioner uh you're not going to, and even if you are the commissioner, I mean, these things involve compromise. And obviously, there's going to be details of the implementation that aren't going to be exactly what you want. But the basic premise of the league finally acknowledging that the goal is to get calls right as much as, more or less, as much as possible and that this is something that uh if you believe sherholtz the umpires are now behind which i mean you know a couple years ago the umpires were like so not behind this uh like this was a non-starter

basically and that the umpires are behind it i mean melvin and beau porter were both behind it and uh they claim that i think they claim that managers are behind it or something like that. I mean, you know, the Padres broadcasted a poll and it was like 78% support for it. I mean, this is like a huge, huge advance over the last five years. And the fact that there's like some kind of weird quirks that, that I agree are kind of quirky and philosophically odd and that we'll probably talk about is, you know,

it's something to, to note, but you, I mean, you don't, I don't think you should throw out the, the, the kind of achievement that this is.

Yeah. I mean, I guess it's that we, we wanted it to be perfect when we finally got it. We've been waiting a long time and agitating for replay and talking about why it makes sense for so many years that I guess it's natural to maybe be a little disappointed when it shows up and it's not the ideal system or it doesn't seem quite what you wanted, but it's close. I mean, this is going to, I think, this is going to prevent the vast majority of incorrect calls that we have lived with in our entire lives as baseball fans, right? Which is something to celebrate. in our entire lives as baseball fans, right?

Which is something to celebrate. I think it was Bob Nightingale wrote that MLB studies showed that there's an average of one blown call every five games or three per night, which seems low to me. I would have guessed that there would be more than that. What would you have guessed? I guess I certainly would have thought one every three games, probably. Yeah, I mean, even counting inconsequential ones that make no difference to the outcome of the game, which is most blown calls, I would have thought it would be a little more common. there's an average of one blown call every five games or three games or whatever it is uh even

having a finite number of of challenges is still going to cover almost all of those i mean you're still gonna you're still gonna have some bone calls there will still be times when someone has used up all the challenges available and there's an incorrect call. And it does seem sort of silly that that's even a possibility now. But I mean, it's going to be it's going to be rare. It's going to be few and far between. I think I think this should cover most of them. Yeah, I think practically speaking, it should essentially cover, you know cover virtually all of them. Now, philosophically, it's very odd. I think that the league, my guess is the league thinks that by having this sort of challenge system, it's actually the somewhat more conservative approach that it kind of

keeps replay from getting out of hand. It's sort of a nod to people who think, oh, it's going to slow the game down too much, how you going to stop it and so they're trying to almost be conservative with this but the having replay is you know sort of philosophically is no change at all from what baseball has always been i mean baseball has always wanted to get calls right and umpires have always wanted to do the best they could with what was available to them. So having replays is no different than having like contact lenses come around whenever those came around or, you know, adding, you know, adding an extra umpire, you know, to have a better, you know, to have better coverage or, you know, whatever the case may be, having better lights for goodness sake. It's, you know,

it's, it's, it's a pretty, it's a pretty simple thing and it fits the goal that baseball has always had. Now, having the challenge system though is totally, totally outside of that because what you're now saying is that we want to have the calls right almost all the time, but not always, not always. Sometimes we still want to get the call wrong. We do want to have this weird punishment in place where every once in a while an irresponsible manager who doesn't use his challenge judiciously in this kind of weird moralistic system that they've set up is going to be punished by not getting his call in the ninth inning

and we're just going to laugh at him. That's a really weird thing and like the way that it introduces strategy into the umpires decisions like now the umpire decision is not is not outside of the players and and uh and managers it's not the umpires are no longer kind of a neutral third party. The umpires are now officially part of the strategy. How well you use your challenges, basically how well you maintain your leverage over the umpires is an official part of the strategy. It feels very weird. Like you said, and I think I agree, it will virtually never matter and it might never matter that we might go 10 years before we see a bad call uh you know in a significance probably not we'll probably go about 10 days but before we see a bad call in a significant situation get uh not overturned because the team you know the manager's

out of replays um which you know incidentally to be fair it would mean no different than it is today i mean today that call would not get overturned and so uh you know, incidentally, to be fair, would mean no different than it is today. I mean, today that call would not get overturned. And so, you know, many more would be overturned. It would be generally a greater good. So functionally it's not a big difference, but like sort of the message baseball is sending is interesting. It changes the relationship of all the players on the field, of all the people on the field of all the people on the field right and and the idea that uh that the challenges are concentrated in the high leverage parts of the game seems sort of strange in in that incorrect calls are presumably fairly evenly distributed throughout the game uh yes and you

know can have just as much impact on the outcome in the fourth inning or fifth inning as they could in the eighth. Well, spread out over the course of the season, I'm not sure that the average leverage index in the ninth inning is higher than the first inning. I mean, spread out over the course of the season, obviously, it reaches much higher peaks. much higher peaks but there's so many seventh eighth and ninth innings where the game is settled that i'm not actually sure that this distributes them evenly even by leverage so that's uh that's strange also um but the fact that there are are three and in practice will be more than three because if you if you challenge and your your is upheld, then you retain that challenge. Although the early challenge does not carry over until the later inning challenge period. But practically this should eliminate most calls. I guess the reason that people are not content and the system that I guess we both probably would have liked to see is just no challenges.

Just the initiative kind of resting with that league official or that video umpire or whoever it turns out to be in the secret bunker at BAM or wherever it is. And that person who is reviewing the calls would review every call and notify the on-field officials if there were a problem, and that would be that. And I guess, I mean, that seems like the ideal system. I mean, that seems like the ideal system. So, you know, it's kind of hard to tell why everyone wouldn't think that's the ideal system. I guess just the fact that it is kind of adventurous and it's an even bigger departure from the nothing that we have currently. So here's my theory.

from the nothing that we have currently. So here's my theory. My theory is that the challenge system is basically people, that half the people in the room are going, oh, well, this is going to take too long waiting for everybody to review. And then the other half go, no, no, no, because we'll get rid of all that time that managers spend arguing. You know, anytime there's a disputed call, instead of having the manager come out and, you know,

kick the water cooler around for three minutes, he'll just come out and he'll do the thing. And so if you had a faceless bureaucratic drone in Manhattan doing all these things kind of out of sight and then radioing in when he needs to change a call, the manager would not have that kind of sense of agency in the situation. And so by having the challenge, that's what keeps the manager arguments from happening. Which, incidentally, do you realize this means no more manager arguments? There will be a few, but this is a huge... Right, you'll still get your balls and strikes arguments. Yeah, yeah yeah they'll show up occasionally but it's going to be so much harder for managers to go get themselves rung up

and uh i mean yeah if you're a traditionalist i can see that being the kind of thing that you would be emotionally attached to as much as anything um but uh yeah so like like in the situation that you're describing the ideal situation, how would they know to stop play and wait for the guy? It would be kind of an awkward implementation. I mean you'd have to just have the crew chief – you'd have to have something in his ear and then he would just all of a sudden stop play, I guess. But think how much pressure is on that guy in the office though. then he would just all of a sudden stop play, I guess, when he hears the voice. But think how much pressure is on that guy in the office, though. Now, is he going to review every aspect of every play?

And, you know, like, it seems to me that he could be, if I had to be that guy, and it was all my responsibility, and I were in charge of making sure there were no missed calls, and there was nobody challenging plays, I would feel like I would want to watch almost every play, I think. Well, not almost every play, but I would want to watch way too many plays and I would want to watch them from way too many angles. The burden, I think, would be too much for that guy. So I actually don't particularly mind that something has to instigate it. It wouldn't be one person at that point. I mean, you'd have, and this would be an extra expense, but you'd have to have people assigned to every game probably. Well, yeah, but I mean, even one person per game,

that would be a, I would think that would be a lot of, you know, that'd be a tremendous burden for me, especially if, you know, if you know if you i feel like you're reviewing i feel like we're all we're we are already those people when we watch a baseball game right we we see replays of everything certainly every okay but every controversial play but you remember that play where uh earlier this year where there was a double play like it was like a three six three double play and the pitcher ran over to cover first, but like the first baseman got back to the bag. And so then the throw comes in, like to first base to get the second out,

and it's a little wild, and the pitcher catches the ball, and he's not on the bag. Justin Grimm, I think it was. Yeah, and so the umpire just didn't pick that up because he wasn't looking at the mitt. He thought the first baseman caught the ball and nobody picked this up like it was i don't as i recall i don't think that the broadcasters picked it up immediately and so like it's just this thing where you're not looking for it there can be missed calls all sorts of places where you're not looking for them so i i mean you know maybe i'm imagining the worst case scenario. But if I were the guy whose responsibility it was, sole responsibility it was to keep any bad calls from happening, I would just be completely paranoid about missing

some detail like that. And I would want to rewatch everything. I mean, I would be awful. Isn't that already how umpires feel? Or should i mean that's that's if i were an on-field umpire i would feel that way i'd be sure but if you had the yeah if you had the ability to stop play and re-watch every play twice though then then uh that's what i'm saying is that you might feel the response you might feel the pressure to stop play too often and so you'd be stopping play constantly that's all i'm saying is that you need something to initiate the review because you can't review every play. I just don't think that they can review every single play. I guess, I mean, if, if you were going to do that in a sport, baseball would be the one to do it probably because there

is so much time between events. Uh, and it's just a series of discrete events in between people scratching themselves and spitting for 30 seconds or so. So there, I mean, generally when you're watching a broadcast, if there's any kind of controversial call, you see that play probably twice before another pitch is thrown, generally. I mean... Yeah, okay, yeah, you might be right. Fair enough. So, I don't know, I feel like... You're probably right. It would be kind of difficult to implement, I mean, it would be strange, I feel like, for the players to kind of always be in this suspense about whether play was about to be stopped or something was about to be overturned.

Like by someone they can't see who's hundreds of miles away. It seems like that would be kind of a strange way to be playing, never knowing whether anything that just happened will actually stand. But I guess that's sort of the way things are now, except that or will be, except that you'll see an umpire charge out at the dugout or, you know, walk out at the dugout and politely request a review. Alright so can I share some of Dan Brooks' imagined issues with this or I guess details that will need to be resolved that I imagine a lot of people aren't thinking about and maybe MLB isn't thinking about but Dan is thinking about

so we're not going to resolve them I'm just going they're amusing and they're interesting and they'll make you think for a bit There's one I was thinking of can I in case it's one that he thought of can I say my thing? Yeah You just need to get credit, can I say my thing? Yeah.

You just need to get credit for everything, don't you, man? Yeah. Isn't, I mean, having, it seems like some clubhouses are close enough to the dugout that you could shout from one to the other or set up some kind of relay system and tell the manager when he should review? Does it seem like that would be plausible? You could kind of have just some clubby or something in there watching the replay. And if it's something that the manager should review, he could shout to some other guy and then that guy could shout to the manager uh and he would know

that he had a good case before he did it you'd have to you'd have to do that before play started again but that seems plausible to me yeah well and you could yeah you certainly you and you you could probably i mean if you wanted to you could use a visit to the mound to stall until you find out yeah there's there's there's parks where you can know, if you had a pair of binoculars, which are they allowed? You can have binoculars if you're in the dugout, can't you? I don't know of any prohibition except for having technology stuff in there. Yeah, it can't be electronic. But yeah, so there's parks where if you had a decent pair of binoculars, you could see the press box TVs from the dugout.

Often you can judge the the press box tvs from the dugout often uh you can judge from the crowd reaction from the crowd yeah because they're like uh the diamond club yeah you know there's always tvs and the diamond club and everything yeah exactly so yeah there's all sorts of ways in which the managers would see the replay probably in time to uh but who cares that seems good we don't want to limit requests. We actually want to encourage them. They should let the manager see it. There should actually be a TV in the dugout. That's the point of it after all. We don't want to restrict successful challenges. We want to restrict unsuccessful challenges. We ideally, I mean, and the rules sort of basically get to this.

Ideally, managers would get every successful challenge made and they would never make an unsuccessful one because that's what the old school guys are worried about is a whole bunch of wasted challenges. So sure, let them, let's just let them have the TV. And there is a line in the Nightingale story about how umpires are in favor of the system because they like the idea that if there's a blown call, a manager will be blamed for misusing his challenges. And then the manager will be berated for making a bad call instead of the umpires. That's something that they are excited about. instead of the umpires for once apparently that's something that they are excited about yeah uh everybody in baseball is awful even from the umpires on up all right uh okay so dan's

issues okay all right so say you haven't had time to get your pitcher warm in the eighth inning yeah there's a rally and you haven't had time to get your pitcher warm could the could you just have your infielders just randomly throw the ball around for a little while and then say oh we tagged that guy and when they go no you didn't go we challenge and they have to go run a challenge they have to go run the replay to make sure that you didn't tag the guy and you you get your extra two minutes i don't see why not seems reasonable be a farce but it seems reasonable yeah uh okay uh second base force outs this is a very good one the neighborhood play what happens to the neighborhood yeah i think gary cohen mentioned this on the broadcast today i i mean

it it either gets caught it either has to get codified or it goes away because you can't have umpires pretending not to see that if there's replays. And I was telling Dan, my first thought was, well, probably a lot of unwritten rules would kind of develop about when you don't use this, but that only works until it's a really do-or-die situation, and some manager says, well, the game's on the line, we're totally using it. So the neighborhood play might be, which isn't, I mean, I guess a lot of people hate the neighborhood play.

I certainly hate it when I'm watching it, but this protects a lot of knees, and it probably doesn't, you know, it's probably a greater good for the game to have legs not being broken as much as possible. So, you know, it's possible that this kills the neighborhood play, which then in turn kills the hard slide. This might be the end of the hard slide. This is why traditionalists are worried about the slippery slope. And if you don't have a hard slide, then you don't have grit. don't have grit you lose grit altogether there's no more grit in baseball yeah or yeah you're right this could we might be seeing the last generation yes there are unforeseen consequences to every every decision okay uh so the ball

uh throw to first base you know force that ground ball to short stop throw to first base does it uh does the ball uh have to be just within the glove does it have to be does it have to have reached the back of his glove and what happens when it rattles around a little bit in his glove which it doesn't so dan described dan says it's like in the nfl he says the nfl now has approximately 89 000 definitions for catch because when you look anything at anything down to frame by frame hd video nothing looks like a catch the catchiest catches in the world are not catches at one one one one frame video the ball appears to move and slide and all sorts of weird stuff so is the guy at first safe if it's bouncing from the back pocket of the glove into the webbing

which happens on every catch when does it count as a catch this is a thing that probably isn't codified and will now have to be codified or something right yeah uh yeah um i i don't know maybe when i guess when the the ball disappears inside the glove it's a catch or i mean i don't know when if it hits the back if it hits the if it hits the glove and is just kind of bouncing around in there and it's not dropped it seems i don't know that seems like a catch to me but um yeah so uh uh okay uh in football when you challenge a play you challenge the entire play every aspect of the play is reviewed there's usually one obvious point or issue but sometimes there are complex scoring decisions so dan asked does every aspect of every play get reviewed so basically my example um to

see if i understood what he was saying is like say um you there's a tag on a stolen base at second but in reviewing this tag at second base which the the dispute is the guy was called safe and he should have been out or vice versa but if the umpire notices the batter interfered on the throw, is that part of the review? If the pitch was foul-tipped, is that part of the review? If the pitcher balked, if the pitcher didn't come to a complete set before the pitch, why wouldn't that be part of the review? Is that part of a review?

Could you be reviewing the tag and end up calling a balk? you be reviewing the tag and end up calling a balk i would guess that they would i would guess that they'd say that the manager would have to specify what what call exactly he is disputing and and that that would be the only thing reviewed but i think so yeah that that's what i would guess well it'd be interesting to see. I'm happy enough, though. All right. We should have just had Dan on. I thought about it.

I thought about it, but you know how I feel about wasting favors on this podcast. Yeah. I like to save my favors. Please. We're doing guests favors when we invite them on. Yeah, Dan. my favors please we're doing guests favors when we invite them on uh yeah dan and there's and there's also i guess some some weird scenarios with runners and having to put them back into places um like uh neil neil damas posted earlier uh tonight a hypothetical scenario. There are runners on first and third, no outs, a fly ball to the right fielder who dives for it and is ruled to have not made the catch. The runner on third scores.

The runner on first, who was three quarters of the way to second base, tries for third and is thrown out. The fielding team manager appeals the ruling. The video says the right fielder made the catch. Now where do you put the runners? Yeah, I mean, so basically the thing about that that doesn't worry me is you're essentially giving the umpires 1% discretion after taking away like 98% of their discretion. I mean, it seems to me like a pretty okay tradeoff that once in a while an umpire gets to actually do something on their own. So it doesn't bother me. I mean, that's pretty common sense stuff.

Well, we'll see. We're treating this as if it is set in stone, and it's not really. Are you saying that they still have an opportunity to review this? Yes. I have already seen several headlines that made use of that construction. So sorry, but this has to be approved by the umpires and the players, which apparently is something that will or won't happen in November. So I wonder whether putting it out there now is intended to put pressure on those parties to pass it, which I think is something I saw some player quoted saying something like that. Maybe Latroy Hawkins saying that he sort of resented it if that was the goal here.

was the goal here. But I guess the onus is kind of on the umpires and the players because it probably wouldn't be the best thing from a PR perspective for the umpires not to pass this thing because they've never been the most popular people in the world because of the job that they do. So, okay. So I guess we're done talking about it. And the takeaway is that we are moderately happy about this. Not moderately. We're very happy about this. We're virtually unreservedly happy. We're not 100% satisfied. But I would say that we have, you know, I think it's fair to say that we have no reservations. say that we have uh you know i i think it's fair to say that we have no reservations well we have there are there are details that we would have done differently but i think i i i at least would like to say that i have no reservations i think that it's uh it's well done and i've i realized

today while i was driving that i've become old and the reason i know that i've become old is it's but it's like four years since i've been mad at Bud Selig. I pretty much just nod and go, oh, he's good for the game. Yeah. I almost enjoyed his, he made a little poke fun at himself and said that he took his usual slow process to come to this decision. And I was almost fond of old slow, deliberate Mr. Selig. Bud's slow leg. Seelig. Bud Slowleg. Yeah.

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