Red Pinstripes: Why review anything?
Plus: More about the extra innings rule and news from around baseball
Good morning and welcome to Red Pinstripes,
Baseball has been buzzing about the replay review system after two blown calls last week. I’ll give my own thoughts on the situation below.
I also learned that the dumb extra innings rule has a new infuriating wrinkle this year. Plus, links from around the league, including ranking aces and a proposal to help bring more action to the game.
It’s an abbreviated Red Pinstripes today, but I think after review you’ll like it…
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Reviewing replay review
Baseball’s replay review system for disputed calls is under increased scrutiny this week, with two examples in NL East games highlighting two different shortcomings of the system.
Thursday, Michael Conforto was batting with the bases loaded in a tie game in the bottom of the ninth. With two strikes, Conforto leaned into a pitch that would have been a strike. He was sent to first base and the Mets walked off with the win.
Everyone, including the Mets broadcasters, knew that the call was wrong. Conforto should have struck out. But the umpires couldn’t go to replay review because the rules say it was a judgement call that could not be reviewed.
Sunday, the Phillies beat the Braves when Alec Bohm scored on a short fly ball to left field. He just beat the throw by Marcell Ozuna, but TV replays showed that Bohm might not have touched the plate. This call was reviewable and most people who watched the replays thought Bohm missed the plate and should have been called out.
The problem here: Bohm was ruled safe. So to overturn the call, the umpires in the replay review center in New York would have been forced to say definitively that Bohm did not touch the plate. And I understand that they didn’t see that evidence, I’m still not sure exactly what I saw.
These were two cases that could swing a division that a lot of people know were the wrong call and could not be fixed through replay review. If you can’t fix obvious calls, what’s even the point of having a replay review system?
The situation gets worse when you look at what a lot of replay review calls have overturned: plays where runners slide into bases and as they slide over a base they lose contact with the bag for an infinitesimally small amount of time. To the naked eye, the player is safe, but on slowed down frame-by-frame video, it’s an out. The system is creating outs where outs were never an issue before.
Replay review was meant to fix the obvious calls -- Armando Galarraga losing his perfect game to a blown call at first base -- but that hasn’t been how the system has worked out, for the most part. Instead, it’s been used to nit-pick things at a speed beyond what the human eye can see. It also hasn’t fixed some of these obvious calls.
I don’t know what baseball can do to fix this. It’s not the only sport that deals with these issues. The NFL has struggled with defining a catch and whether it should review penalties like pass interference.
Part of me wants to scrap the replay review. Blown calls are part of baseball’s history and maybe it’ll just have to stay that way. After all, the games in New York and Atlanta this weekend showed that blown calls continue to exist even with replay review.
But technology has become far too great a part of the game to ignore what replay can fix. Every controversial play will be replayed dozens of times from dozens of angles on the broadcast. Fixing most of those calls, even if replay review still misses a couple, seems like a noble endeavor.
As an alternative, some people have suggested a change to how the replay system works. First, for those nit-picky slide plays, just make the space above the base a safe zone once the player has made contact. That way you’re not punishing players for the laws of physics temporarily disconnecting them from the bag.
Second, one suggestion I’ve seen this week is to get rid of the whole “incontrovertible evidence” rule for overturning calls. Instead, send a play to the replay room. Don’t tell the umpires in the room what the call was and ask them to decide what the call should be.
That proposal fixes an issue Jayson Stark identified this week. Full-time umpires make the call in the replay room as part of their regular rotation. They might be reluctant to overrule their colleagues. If you don’t tell them what the call was, they might be able to better evaluate the play.
In his excellent breakdown of the replay issues this week, Ken Rosenthal has a different suggestion: put officials in charge of replay who aren’t umpires. Have people who are not part of the umpires’ union make the replay decisions.
Either way, it seems like accounting for umpire bias needs to be a part of the discussion.
Finally, what can be reviewed will have to be expanded. The idea that a play like the Conforto hit-by-pitch cannot be reviewed is insane.
This is a complicated issue, and reviews get more complicated by technology every year. We have more angles and better cameras so we can get down to the granular details of a play. But maybe that’s actually bad and we obsess too much over calls we might never have known needed to be fixed. Instead, we should appreciate blown calls as part of the tapestry of the game, not something that can be fixed forever.
The extra innings rule is worse than I thought
Last week, I went on the record with my hate for the ghost runner on second rule. This week, we learned the rule is even worse than we thought.
Part of the rule requires that the batter when the last out of the previous inning was required should be the ghost runner on second. Well, it turns out there’s an exception to that. If the pitcher occupies that spot in the lineup and would have to run at second, the runner before the pitcher goes to second.
We didn’t run into this last year because the universal designated hitter was in place. But with pitchers hitting again this year, it’s cropped up in a couple of games.
I understand the intent here is to make sure pitchers don’t get hurt. But most teams end up using pitchers as pinch runners anyway at some point during the season. If teams are so concerned about a pitcher running, just change pitchers.
This facet of the rule became even more ridiculous Tuesday in the Mets-Phillies game when Dominic Smith made the last out of the 7th inning, then the Mets double-switched him out of the game and the pitcher’s spot took his place in the lineup. In the 8th inning (extra innings during a doubleheader like Tuesday) that meant that the pitcher occupied that spot and Francisco Lindor, who hit before Smith, was the runner on second.
Let’s just stop this whole charade and play real baseball.
MLB News and notes
Ranking MLB's 10 current aces -- and the candidates to join them (ESPN)
ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel looks ranks the best aces in baseball, and yes there are only ten of them according to McDaniel. While each staff has an “ace” or its best pitcher. There are really only a handful of pitchers in baseball that can be considered true aces.
It's probably time to be concerned about Javier Báez (FanGraphs)
Báez is a former MVP and just last year was the face of baseball’s flagship video game. But everything has gone very wrong at the plate for him over the past two seasons and his approach has completely regressed. Now his walk rate is dipping below 3% and his strikeout rate is well above 30%.
ESPN’s Jeff Passan has a plan to help get more action into baseball and less of the three true outcomes (walks, strikeouts and home runs): he wants to reduce pitching staffs to 10 pitchers.
That might seem like a crazy idea, but listen to Passan. I think it’s worth considering.