COOPERSTOWN — Are you ready to dissect whether a manager used his challenges properly to win a ballgame?
Major League Baseball announced Thursday its intention to institute 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 retreat 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 89 percent of umpires’ calls will be deemed “reviewable,” and 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, which include balls and strikes. 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 reviewable calls.
Home run calls, the one component of the current replay system, will be “grandfathered” into the current set-up, Schuerholz said. A manager does not need to use a challenge for reviews of home runs.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Mets manager Terry Collins said. “We have to keep up with the technology of today, that is where our sport is going. That is where every sport is going.
“What you’re going to see one of these days is somebody is going to challenge that the second baseman is off the bag and call the guy safe and now you’re going to make the second baseman stand on the base and Robinson Cano gets absolutely the [stuff] knocked out of him, that rule will change, too. That play at second base is going to become a huge factor now, and you’re going to have a guy that’s going to have to stay in there, you’re going to see some banged-up second baseman.”
Yankees manager Joe Girardi said he had not reviewed the new rules when asked after yesterday’s game against the Angels.
“I don’t really want to comment on it until I understand what the rule is. And then I’ll go from there,’’ Girardi said. “I want to hear it from Joe Torre or MLB before I really comment.’’
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 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.”
— Additional reporting by Mike Puma and Kevin Kernan