Baseball replay is horrible. Here's how to fix it.
Baseball is the game most rooted in its old traditions, which is why its success rate at making monumental rule changes has been so impressive. No purist wanted each league to add a wild-card team but by the second season, the three-division, four-team playoff format seemed so natural as to render that little 90-year stretch where pennant races were basically discouraged as folly. Interleague play may be passé now but for years, even the staunchest baseball purist had to admit it was sort of cool to see the Yankees play the Dodgers. (Now the pendulum has swung back and it'd be cooler if the AL and NL only met in the World Series.) The second wild-card team was a great success too. Baseball, which always has one eye to the past, was successfully looking into its future.
And then replay came along.
It was only natural that baseball would one day adopt replay. It's a practice used by every other major pro sport and, in a perfect world, would take little time off the field to bring about the proper call on it. But it's not a perfect world, neither of those things are true and replay has turned into the bane of baseball's existence. (Well, replay and Cardinals fans.) Here's why:
(Leon Halip/Getty Images)
1. Montessori schools have more defined rules than baseball's replay guidelines.
The rules section on replay review totals approximately 8,500 words. Forty books of the Bible have fewer words than that. (There are 66 total.) That means more than 60% of the chapters in the greatest story ever told have fewer words than a set of fairly obvious instructions to Jim Joyce. Oh, and part of those 8,500 words are about handling replays that overlap with the performance of God Bless America. Seriously.
In that case, you might think, baseball has thought of everything. There's no gray area, not when 8,500 words are involved. Except that it's all gray area. Those 8,500 words are just a long way of giving off the appearance of saying something consequential while knowing the meaning is completely hollow. It's sort of like an episode of Girls. In the case of the Michener novel masquerading as baseball rulebook chapter, more is not more and the overall denseness of the edicts leave far too much room open for interpretation.
(Photo by Leon Halip/Getty Images)
2. Teams have the ability to challenge far too long after a play ends.
Here's one of the key sections from the replay rule:
Seems pretty simple. Challenge before the next play. It's the same in the NFL, where a team has to throw their flag prior to the following snap. It makes sense until you remember that baseball is not football and there's no play clock (or hurrying offense) you have to beat to make the challenge. Baseball realizes this too, which is why, later on in the rule, we come across this paragraph:
And this, as they say, is where our story begins.
(Photo by Nick Laham/Getty Images)
First of all, baseball is all about delay. It is, for better or worse, the essence of the game. The sport is all about those practice swings and trips around the rubber and throws to first - the ones that both annoy fans and ratchet up the tension. Now delays are a violation? Doing something that's normal in between plays is all of a sudden illegal?
It's impossible for umps to rule something an intentional delay anyway. I mean, technically, isn't all delay intentional? Sure one may come because a batter wants to do something normal, like adjust his gloves. That's still a delay. A pitcher-catcher meeting is still a delay even though there's a legitimate reason for it. You can't regulate something that's already legal.
It was like when the NFL used to have officials try and gauge intent. I mean, the job is hard enough as it is. Now you're asking the refs to determine whether an act took place of a man's free will? It's impossible, the same way the baseball rule is, which is why it's taken advantage of so much. Players and coaches know the umps aren't going to call them on a pre-replay, so when there's a close play at first, you'll get (depending on who the call went against) a batter calling time or a pitcher playing with the rosin bag, all while folks in the clubhouse check the replay as the coach not-at-all subtly looks behind him for the thumbs up or thumbs down on whether to challenge the play. It's a circus - a very, very boring circus.
It's also annoying, time-consuming and goes against the fundamental rules of replay, which state that a call must be so obviously wrong in order for it to be overturned. The same should be true with challenging one. You get one look at the play live and then have to decide. That's the way it is in tennis. A player isn't allowed to break eye contact with the spot where the ball landed before declaring a challenge. (In theory, that is. Often you'll hear a coaching box call out if a ball was long, giving a little help to the player. But the point is, the players don't get a chance to think about it for 60 seconds. It has to be an immediate decision.) Baseball has essentially legislated delay into the rule book (despite specifically disallowing it) with this section and teams will do everything in their power to make sure a coach has seen a replay (or a least heard about it) before challenging. Even jaywalking gets enforced more than the farcical "don't delay" rule.
(Photo by Leon Halip/Getty Images)
3. It takes too long.
Let's say I'm watching a game by myself. A guy steals second and is called safe, but it's close enough for one team to challenge. Generally, the broadcast will have shown enough replays that it's clear whether a play should be upheld or overturned before a team even challenges. It's at least clear enough by the time the crew chief gets to the headphones. Yet we still have to wait 2-3 minutes (I don't care what the rules say, that's how long it usually takes) for the whole rigamarole to complete itself. Why not give an ump a cell phone (or a pager if you're worried about connectivity issues) so he can get a text from New York once the ruling is made? It's literally that simple. Forget headphones and slow crew-chief walks to behind home plate. "Safe" or "out" via text and - bam - the job is done in 30 seconds.
(Photo by Ralph Freso/Getty Images)
4. They're looking at too many angles.
This is sort of "it takes too long, section II" but bear with me - this is like my airing of grievances. It's cathartic. No replay, in any sport, should have to be viewed more than once from every available angle. If, at the end of one round of viewing each angle, there's no reason to overturn, then that's it. Challenge over. Don't keep looking at replays looking for a reason to overturn. How a call could be made 100 seconds after all the replays were cycled through twice is inexplicable to. What are the replay guys seeing the second or third time around that makes them think the call is different from the first time they saw it? If it takes that long to make a decision about a replay, then there is certainly not enough evidence to overturn a call. Waiting so long is a tacit acknowledgement that the play is too close to call.
5. The benchmark to overturn a rule is oft ignored.
So, there's 8,500 words in your rule about replay. You'd think a whole lot of those words would be dedicated to the upholding or reversal of replay - you know, the entire point of the whole addendum. NOPE! Here's what in the book (or online, where I was reading about it):
(Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)
That's it. Sixty-three words. About 0.75% of the replay rulebook has to do with the actual important part of the process and those 63 words contain the phrase "in other words," which is the funniest, most unsure of itself baseball writing since the Phillies drew up Ryan Howard's contract. But let's look at it again:
That's basically the same thing as the NFL's 'indisputable visual evidence" standard, though with far more couching. In the NFL, the main argument one would probably make about replay is that officials don't overturn enough calls. The overturn rate was around 35% last year. Baseball's was almost split down the middle, 50/50. Why? I don't think umpires are using the same strict standard for what constitutes an overrule. They seems to be operating under an "I think" credo, when they should be operating under an "I know" one.
Looking at the replay, it looked like Heisey was probably out. There was one replay angle that showed Franco's swipe may have caught him in the shin or the foot. But "may have" is the operative word. There were no telltale signs that it happened. The glove didn't show resistance. There was no freeze-frame moment of a glove on the body. Heisey's pants didn't move like they'd been hit. It just kinda looked like he got him. In those situations, Heisey has to be safe because the standard for overturn is supposed to be indisputability. And nobody - nobody - could have possibly said "I know that tag hit him." The play should have stood. And if Heisey had originally been called out, the play should have stood too even though you could certainly think he hadn't been tagged. There has to be total and complete evidence to overturn plays. Too often, there's not.
6. All replays should be shown at regular speed.
This is my personal sports crusade. It comes down to fairness and speed. When it comes to replay review, umpires/refs/whoever should get one view per angle, at full speed. Period. Show the super slo-mo on TV to your heart's delight, but for review, the judgment has to come at the same speed at which the original decision was made. If it's clear at full speed that a call is wrong, that's when you know you had a bad call. This would cut replay review time in half, at minimum.
(Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
7. A lame system of alert
There's an understated drama in seeing whether an NFL head coach, clutching the red flag in his hand, will toss it onto the field. There's a not-at-all understated drama about whether he'll trip while getting the flag out of his sock. On a close shot in tennis, watching a player stalk the court, eyes focused on the spot, and waiting for them to throw up a challenge finger is solid too. How does baseball do it?
"Point to the headset technician." It sounds like the world's worst sexual euphemism and is perhaps the most boring thing in a game that's already fairly boring. (And I love baseball. But, come on, it can be boring.) Give us something we can work with! Make managers give the wink and the gun. Have them wear orange gloves with those orange paddles used by ground crew at airports. Put a live mic in the dugout and have them use some snappy catchphrase, preferably written by the writing team from a 1980s sitcom. Employ skywriters. Do something. Do anything. Just don't have a manager point to a technician.
(Photo by Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)
Oh, and in case you needed reminding at how awful baseball's replay rules are, that last section includes the words "encouraged." These aren't rules, they're suggestions at a European youth hostel.
It's time to change replay. Yesterday. Baseball has enough problems, don't willfully add to them with an unnecessary, lengthy process that does just as much harm as it does good.
(Photo by Jeffrey Phelps/Getty Images)
(Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)