Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

MLB

Fancy new replay hub will help baseball get more calls right

Well , the equipment is cool.

“This,” someone said, “is like the greatest Man Cave ever.”

Well, there’s no tapped kegs and there’s no wings on demand and there’s no bowls of chips and plates covered with guacamole. But here, on the fifth floor of offices of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, inside the Replay Operations Room, there is a mesmerizing collection of pods and TV screens and video and light. There are probably worse places to come to work.

Starting Sunday, there will be two major-league umpiring crews who will be in this room every day there’s a baseball game, and in shifts they will take turns monitoring every game, whether it’s a full slate of 15 on a Wednesday or a trickling few like you might get on a Thursday.

Two crews, eight umpires, 16 eyes — all of them fastened on these monitors, and these games and, when a bang-bang play happens at first base or a spike and a ball arrive at the same time at third, this is where the ultimate arbitration will occur. When full-blown replay arrives for good and for real starting Sunday, this is where the sport’s appeals court will reside, and preside.

This is where the Brave New World is born.

“Managers have something they never had before,” Joe Torre said. “I’ve told them they can use it like a new strategy. It’s a chance not to go home at night shaking their heads, saying, ‘I wish he didn’t miss that call. …’”

Torre turns 74 in July, a few days before he will be enshrined in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. He had, in fact, just arrived home from there when he dialed into the offices of MLB to chat with a roomful of reporters who descended on the offices at Chelsea Market to have a firsthand look at how the Replay Revolution will happen.

He’s admittedly of the old school, admittedly of a time when managers shrugged their shoulders and simply acknowledged that over the course of a long season, over 162 games, bad calls and good calls generally cancel each other out. And when someone asked him if he remembered an especially egregious call that had gone against him in his career that replay might have solved, he chuckled.

“Well,” he said, “I can tell you one where I’m glad we didn’t have replay.”

He didn’t utter the words “Jeffrey Maier.” He didn’t have to.

“I have a ring because of it,” he said.

But even Torre acknowledges the technology available now made avoiding replay seem obstinate and stubborn, two adjectives baseball desperately wants to avoid. And he said umpires have slowly come around to feel the same way baseball did: they would rather be right. And if video allows them to be right even more than they have been before … that’s hard to argue with.

Besides, here’s a dirty little secret: most of the games you watch are going to be blissfully unaffected. Baseball did an intense review of every call made last year. Of the calls likely to be reviewed 86 percent were either for a force play or a tag play — the two most basic plays in the game.

You think it could be unfair if a manager uses one review, wins and gets another, wins and then is out of challenges? There were 2,431 games played last year. Would you like to guess how many times a team had three reviewable calls go against them in one game?

That would be zero.

It is a wonderful safeguard. It is a useful backstop. But the way MLB has constructed the replay system, it seems unlikely there will be too many confrontations that will bring the games — and the game — to too many standstills. The umpires sitting before the screens will have as many as 12 angles to choose from and three verdicts to render: “confirm” or “overturn” (if they see “clear and convincing” evidence); or “stand” (if there isn’t enough on the replay to change the original call).

And for Torre, the benefit is simple.

“Maybe he can have one or two fewer sleepless nights,” he said. He meant the managers. But eventually, it may be obvious he’s talking about the fans, too.