Mid-season? Really?
JMB · August 26, 2008 at 2:17 pm · Filed Under General baseball
As expected, MLB today announced it will begin using instant replay for “boundary calls”–basically, wether or not home runs were fair or foul, interfered with, or went over the wall at all. The unexpected part is that the new system begins… Thursday. (Wire story here, more detailed MLB.com story here)
Not during spring training, not to be tested during the Arizona Fall League, not put in place over the All-Star break… Thursday. Right in the middle of the season. It’s unclear to me from these stories how much testing has taken place. I hope it’s a least a little bit, because starting something like this on a random day in the middle of the season seems, well, like something only MLB would do.
I agree, Jason.
I’m glad they are finally doing it, and the odds that it will hose one team or another may be low, but still. Rules changes, especially something like this, should never happen part way through the season.
I assume they’re doing it now so they can get any ‘kinks’ worked out before the playoffs…?
Well, I consider the playoffs part of the “season.” It shouldn’t be introduced on day 20, day 160, or day 1 of the playoffs. If you’re going to change a rule, it should be done to begin the season so the playing field is even all the way throughout.
Besides, it is boundry calls only. Blown boundry calls happen less in the playoffs due to the two extra umpires down the lines.
I’d rather have it put in now than suffer a bad call in the postseason.
that I understand the concerns, but can see the logic, too. They want it in place for the playoffs, where a missed call could be huge. Certainly the multiple disputed calls earlier in the year spurred them to react so quickly.
I think it’s OK as long as the crew chief on the field has the final authority on the call. If the video isn’t good enough, the umps can decide on the field like they do now.
I could see changes being made after it is tried, and the rest of the regular season isn’t a bad initial trial period. If it is too screwy, they can stop it for the playoffs and head back to the drawing board.
“Blown boundry calls happen less in the playoffs due to the two extra umpires down the lines.”
Jeffrey Maier?
This will be fun to watch. Managers don’t get challenges, but how will a crew chief react whenever a manager demands that he review the play ? Also, anyone who argues about a decision after review will be ejected, as if they were arguing balls and strikes.
I like it. They’ve limited the application to potential home run balls only. The worst case scenario here is that they continue to get some of these wrong. Yes, there may also be delays to the game. But of all the sports the flow of a baseball game is the most commonly interrupted by arguments over controversial calls anyway. And if you argue after a replay review…it’s automatic ejection. There could be unforseen issues, but it’s really hard to argue against making sure we get home run calls correct.
And these cases happen pretty rarely. The odds any of us watches a game this season in which instant replay review comes into play are pretty small.
Uh, these replays better not happen often. Just what I want, ballgames to take even longer… especially when we’re down by 4 or 6 or 8 or 10 runs.
Surprising that it comes mid-season, but really, the sooner this is implemented the better.
Not so long ago I remember squinting at fair vs. foul replays and having no idea which side of the foul pole a ball was passing on. More and better cameras and zooms (etc) really mean that there is no reason for “boundary” call ever to be wrong if replay can be used. I’ll give MLB a “huzzah” on this.
I still disagree. You don’t change stuff part way through. What if Bud woke up tomorrow and said “You know, the NL would score a lot more runs if they didn’t have a pitcher hitting,” and inserted the DH rule into the NL so they had time to try it out before the playoffs, where it would mean more?
I didn’t say the impact of blown calls in the playoffs is smaller, or that it never happens.
“I still disagree. You don’t change stuff part way through. What if Bud woke up tomorrow and said “You know, the NL would score a lot more runs if they didn’t have a pitcher hitting,†and inserted the DH rule into the NL so they had time to try it out before the playoffs, where it would mean more?”
That is comparing apples and doughnuts. No rules are changing here, just the tools that the existing officials have at their disposal in order to enforce the existing rules of the game.
I don’t see what the problem is. Its pretty easy to use, who cares when it is introduced? I am glad MLB is finally progressing in this vital area.
I agree with Selig’s contention that this will sometimes take less time than what we are faced with now.
A close play . . . ump makes a call . . . manager #1 argues . . . umps huddle . . . umps change call . . . manager #2 argues.
This decision reminds me of how the NBA, a few years ago, made the decision to switch to 7-game first-round series near the end of the year.
JMB sighting!
So, why do they insist on having the on-field umpires go off somewhere else for instant replay? Why not have a guy huddled in a booth with the replay monitor and a walkie talkie to buzz the crew chief.
BZZZZ. “Hey, Maynard. I’ve got a clear view, that ball was foul. Charlie blew the call.”
Worst case. “I need a minute Maynard. Let me check the other angle. Can’t tell there either. Last one, hold on, queuing it up. Wait, wait. Okay. Wow, close. Nope, foul ball. Definitely a foul ball.”
Done is a matter of seconds, without any umpires jogging over to a phone or a viewscreen where the TV camera’s linger on him for three or four minutes, plus nobody really needs to know it was Instant Replay. The umps huddle together on the field, like they sometimes do, the crew chief gets the replay report in his earphone, and makes the call. Treat the replay ump just like any other ump – if he has a better view than the guy who made the call, he tells the crew chief and the crew chief decides who to go with.
16:
Because the Umpires kicked off and wanted to be included in the process, so to avoid any further delay in the process and also to ward off any potential industrial strife, MLB caved in to the Umpires demands. Really, it won’t make too much difference. MLB is hardly the fastest paced game anyway, after all.
Re 12:
The three to four guys earlier this year who had home runs taken away by blown calls?
The point is well made. Why now when you’ve already had 130+ games to f*** it up? “Hey, sorry you had that happen to you yesterday, Alex, but we wont have that problem now!”
Umm, the “unexpected part” was also expected, since it was announced a while ago that they were going to start using it this month.
#18 How is it somehow unfair to players to have home runs counted as home runs? They aren’t moving the fences. They’re not counting doubles as a home run. They will just more accurately determine whether a struck ball is or is not a homer. This could just as easily benefit A-Rod by keeping someone he’s playing against from receiving credit for a home run on a long foul ball.
You might be right, but it doesn’t make any sense. A “hidden” replay official would cause the least amount of embarrassment for the on-field umps, because it would be just like another member of the crew saying he had a better angle (and the crew chief could always decide to overrule the replay ump, so no loss of [cartman]ah-thor-i-tay[/cartman]). Plus, it would add another paycheck for the Umps Union (the UU?) to hoover dues out of. If they didn’t understand that, and the league couldn’t ‘splain it to them, I’m at a loss.
Or is it more important to MLB to “look like” they’re trying to get it right. “Hey, look, we have technology!” In that case, they’d want the intrusion of replay to be as obvious as possible. Hmmm. Don’t know.
A “hidden†replay official would cause the least amount of embarrassment for the on-field umps, because it would be just like another member of the crew saying he had a better angle (and the crew chief could always decide to overrule the replay ump, so no loss of [cartman]ah-thor-i-tay[/cartman]). Plus, it would add another paycheck for the Umps Union (the UU?) to hoover dues out of. If they didn’t understand that, and the league couldn’t ’splain it to them, I’m at a loss.
Yeah, this is exactly how I envisioned them doing it — it seemed like the best scheme all around. The umpires get a 5th (7th in playoff games) man added to every officiating crew, so they should be happy, and it would be the least intrusive and most time-efficient method, so MLB should be happy. Basically you’d have one of the officials on the field (the crew chief presumably) with a earbud tied to a radio, and a guy sitting up somewhere in the media offices with access to the all the feeds (and probably an engineer to help him, at least until they get the umps trained in how to use the most rudimentary of AV equipment). Most of the time the latter guy is just a spectator like anybody at home watching on TV, but whenever there’s a close boundary call he can start scrolling frame by frame through the feeds and whisper into the ump’s ear the same thing the people watching at home probably already know — whether they blew the call or not.
The technology exists to have this all done by a couple of guys sitting in the league offices somewhere, for all the games of the day simultaneously (since there’s unlikely to be two or more close calls going on at the same time), with the feeds and verbal calls going by satellite; but adding one more official to each crew seems like the more politically astute route.
That is, if MLB did anything in a sensible fashion.
Joser, perhaps a good idea, but much easier said than done. You are talking about multiple video feeds, which requires tremendous expansion of the technical capabilities of each ballpark. With 11 games on at the same time tonight (ET and CT), you are talking about well more than 100 video feeds, with each needing a record mechanism in the league office.
No, the worst case scenario is that this changes the outcome of a playoff race. A team that lost an outcome-changing homerun to a bad call earlier in the season now has a replay decided against them, and misses the playoffs by a game. Yes, this is highly unlikely, but this is the principle governing why rule changes don’t happen midseason.
No, I think you missed my (and other’s) point. There have already been blown calls this year for homeruns called fouls and fouls called homeruns. The course of the season has already been marred by these inaccuracies. Who knows how the season turns out if these calls were made right in the first place.
But NOW they want to implement this? Now that we’ve already had course altering bad calls made by the umpiring staff, MLB thinks it’s a good idea to do reviews on long balls? Why during the same season when mistakes were already made? Why not at the beginning of the season or next? Why wait to have this new system govern a fraction of the games in the 2008 season?
My first reaction was that this was weird and stupid, but really… other than the fact that it could have been done earlier, how is this a bad thing? It is very limited in scope and it is hard to see how it’s going to go wrong. Does anyone really think it’s somehow *unfair* to get a call correct in the course of the remainder of the season that, absent replay, might have been call wrong? That’s some pretty warped logic, there. To those who say they’re changing the rules… This not changing the rules – this is a way to get the rules *right* in cases where otherwise they might be clearly and unambiguosly wrong.
Yeah, don’t look now, but I think that’s two in as many weeks.
Yes. Sooner the better.
Yes. See above.
To keep mistakes from happening.
Again, to keep mistakes from happening. It stinks when the wrong decision is made on calls where the umpires generally have ZERO clue as to the correct call. This goes beyond being a judgment call into just guessing.
Mistakes = bad
Joser, perhaps a good idea, but much easier said than done. You are talking about multiple video feeds, which requires tremendous expansion of the technical capabilities of each ballpark.
No, you’re using the cameras they already have to telecast each game. This requires zero expansion of the technical capabilities of any MLB ballpark.
With 11 games on at the same time tonight (ET and CT), you are talking about well more than 100 video feeds, with each needing a record mechanism in the league office.
Even at 720p HD, 100 feeds with moderate compression (H.264 Level 3.2) is less 2Gbps, which is easily purchasable bandwidth and trivial to record on a RAID array. Guess what? They’ve already done this and have been doing it for years.
Heck, MLB will send me, or you, or anybody 6 simultaneous feeds.
The awkward thing that JMHawkins and I were objecting to is the little stroll over to the dugout or umpire room or whatever that the crew chief will have to take just to look at the screen:
The only difference between what they’re actually doing and what JMHawkins and I have proposed is that the “replay official” (“umpire supervisor or former umpire”) is not a real official, and he’s back in NY. We’re just suggesting they just add a man to each crew, sitting in front of that screen, and let him make the call. They rotate crew chiefs from one night to the next anyway, and they trust one another to make calls on things like checked swings already, so it’s not like you’re subverting authority or something. But maybe the umpire union doesn’t want to get any bigger, I don’t know.
This seems strange to me, too. Why wouldn’t the union want to increase membership? Especially if it meant a five-man rotation, where each umpire, in turn, got his day in the replay booth (or wherever it is set up)? I’m sure a chance to sit in the shade for an August game in Texas or KC must seem appealing. MLB must have really balked at upping union membership, and wanted the replay guys to be separate from umpiring crews.
Maybe they’ll go that route eventually, after a lot of off-season negotiations. This kind of has a gum-and-twine improvisational quality to it, driven by all the bad east coast press over the miscalled HRs for ARod, etc.
joser,
This compression that you speak of . . . will it be of high enough quality to provide any meaningful video to eyes in this office in NY. Broadcast quality transmission of 720p is expensive and requires specific equipment at each ballpark for each video feed. This is the extra technical gear that I speak of, not the cameras. If one desires to bring in all the camera feeds to a central office. I would surely hope that MLB is using higher quality video to distribute to crew chiefs than they are distributing via MLBAM.
The article you linked from mmlb.com does not explain how mlb has captured game feeds in the past. Do they simply have a DSS setup that records the game, are they bringing the games in via fiber ? Nor does the article divulge the video format in which they are receiving and recording each game.
It’s higher quality than you as a consumer get from cable (generally sat is better, over the air is best). The cameras have to be HD as well (and they are at all the parks now, AFAIK). Compression isn’t a particularly hard problem anymore, at least at 720p resolutions (we’re well past the point where consumer grade PCs can do faster than real time encoding). Sure, they compress the crap out of what they send over MLB.COM, but that’s because the end users for that may be on 1Mbit lines (or worse). MLB doesn’t have that constraint for their own internal purposes. Presumably the format they’re using is sufficient for this purpose and is almost certainly better than you see at home. It’s entirely doable, and probably with the equipment they already have.
But since they’re keeping the feed entirely at the ballpark, and not relying on people back at the central office to make the call, they could just use the uncompressed HD feed from the ballpark cameras, which is definitely getting buffered locally.
People, please. That’s probably exactly what the umpires want and asked for. It is MLB that doesn’t want to pay for the extra ump at each location. So they pipe it to a central technician, and he waits for his cell phone to ring. What the umpires union argued is that the technician doesn’t get to actually overrule the call on the field, and doesn’t get to call the Crew Chief to say a call should be reviewed, which is probably what MLB proposed to begin with. The Crew Chief gets to decide when a call needs a review, and he also needs to be the one deciding, so they have to get him the game feed.
I agree that it would make more sense to make the guy monitoring the feeds a full-blown umpire, and just rotate that job amoung the regular crews, but they probably didn’t have time to negotiate how that would work, so they went with the kludgy band-aid solution.