COOPERSTOWN — Are you ready to dissect whether a manager used his challenges properly to win a ballgame?
Major League Baseball announced Thursday its intention of instituting a dramatically expanded and revamped instant replay system by Opening Day of 2014. The process will be driven by a “challenge” setup similar to that of the NFL. Owners will formally vote on the system at their next meeting November in Orlando, and MLB also must get the Players Association and World Umpires Association on board.
“It’s historic,” commissioner Bud Selig said. “There’s no question about it.”
As explained by Braves president John Schuerholz, who formulated the plan along with MLB executive vice president of baseball operations Joe Torre and MLB adviser Tony La Russa, a manager will get three challenges per game — one from the first through sixth innings and two from the seventh until the game’s conclusion.
When a manager wants to challenge a call, Schuerholz said, he will “verbally assert” his desire to the home-plate umpire or crew chief, at which point one of those two umpires will treat to a “communications center,” likely somewhere by the backstop. The umpire will confer with another crew situated in MLB Advanced Media’s headquarters in Manhattan, and it’s the Manhattan-based crew that will make the final ruling.
If the umpires’ call gets upheld, then the manager will lose his challenge. If the call gets reversed, then the manager will retain his challenge.
The idea behind going to a manager-driven operation, rather than one driven by the umpires, comes from trying to limit the delays in the game, Schuerholz said.
“We didn’t want (an umpire-driven system), because we felt it would impact the rhythm and the flow and the charm of our game,” Schuerholz said. “We believe there’s a happy balance between getting more calls right and still maintaining and protecting those elements of our game. The uniqueness of baseball.”
Schuerholz said that 89 percent of umpires’ calls will be deemed “reviewable,” and that includes all fair-foul and outfield trap calls that are part of the current collective bargaining agreement (but were never implemented) as well as all safe-out calls. Schuerholz declined to get overly specific in detailing the 11 percent of “unreviewable” calls. The one example he cited was whether or not a pitch hit a batter, because, “They call a ball dead, the runners are running, it didn’t hit him — they’d have to reset the clock, reset the runners, it’s a nightmare for everybody.” Managers can argue unreviewable calls, Schuerholz said, but they aren’t allowed to argue unreviewable calls.
Home run calls, the one component of the current replay system, will be “grandfathered” into the current setup, Schuerholz said. A manager does not need to use a challenge for reviews of home runs.
MLB plans to meet with the managers at the winter meetings in December (also in Orlando) and start training umpires during the Arizona Fall League. Schuerholz stressed, furthermore, that 2014 would represent “Phase One,” and that the game’s leaders would see what worked and what didn’t and plan to make adjustments for 2015.
“We have moved forward with a plan that will give our managers an opportunity to help control the calls that are made, that impact their team,” Schuerholz said. “Give them a better opportunity to see to it that they have an opportunity to win the game. It’s the first time in the history of baseball that managers have been empowered with this capability.”