Instant Replay Is Worth Having

Braves president John Schuerholz, a member of the instant-replay approval committee, indicated in January that the first year of expanded replay would be a “work in progress,” that this year would be merely “a start” in a three-phase process. His words ring true today, nearly one full season into the experiment. Make no mistake: Replay hasn’t been perfect. The review process often takes too long. Some of the rules haven’t always been clear. And the logistics of actually initiating a replay are clunky and badly in need of a change.

Between those valid issues, a few high-profile mistakes and some pushback from a vocal minority, you might think replay has been more failure than success. But as you slowly walk out to the umpire, wait for your bench coach to give you a thumbs-up to challenge and then have the MLBAM operations center in New York review that opinion, the indisputable result comes back: Replay has been a massive success, and was long overdue. Sure, there are kinks to be worked out, it’s not going away anytime soon, nor should it.

What has worked?

When Major League Baseball first announced expanded replay, they said they had reviewed 50,000 close plays from the 2013 season and found that 377 of them had been incorrect. Through Sept. 4, in less than a full season, we’ve already seen 509 calls overturned, which accounts for 46.79 percent of all reviewed plays. Even if the true number of incorrect plays is somewhere in the middle — we don’t have enough years of data to know what the “usual” number is yet — that’s a considerable number of avoided mistakes. Think about how many thousands and thousands of mistaken plays must have gone uncorrected over the years.

In fact, fixing incorrect calls has become such a regular affair that there have been exactly five days all season when there hasn’t been at least one overturned call. There also have been five days when at least eight calls have been overturned. If we’ve learned anything, it’s that it’s almost impossible to get every call right without the aid of technology, and it’s not just a few mistakes now and then: It’s a steady multiple-times-daily occurrence. To think that baseball would willingly go back to a time in which everyone watching on television would know a mistake was made while the umpires would not is neither desirable nor realistic.

To get more specifics, I consulted my friend Daren Willman over at Baseball Savant, which has an instant-replay database we can use to identify exactly what types of plays have been corrected (or not). A table with those results (through Sept. 3) is below:

Overwhelmingly, most challenges have fallen into one of two categories: 1) force plays, such as whether a runner beats the ball to the bag; or 2) tag plays (which are self-explanatory). Just those two types of plays alone have accounted for 75 percent of all replays. In the case of force plays, a majority of challenges have been overturned, and for tag plays, it’s close to even.

Beyond the big two, it fractures pretty quickly, with the remaining challenges breaking down into 12 categories, only two of which have happened even 5 percent of the time. Those two challenge types, however, are extremely important because home runs (82 challenges, 21 overturned) and the much-maligned home-plate collision challenges (75 challenges, 10 overturned) directly play into whether runs are put on the board or not. In fact, you can argue that no one cares if a single is accurately called safe or out in a game with a big lead, but for plays that obviously and immediately affect the scoreboard, it’s vital that baseball gets them right. Of those 21 homers, 11 were originally home runs that turned into non-homers, and 10 were non-homers that became home runs.

You might think that if anyone would be against all this, it would be umpires, because they’ve been proven wrong more than anyone has expected — again, more than 500 times — and perhaps in some individual cases, that’s true. But overall, this has been a boon to umps as well, simply because they have a far smaller chance of going down as one of the unfortunate footnotes of history that some of their predecessors have become.

You likely remember the name of the umpire (Don Denkinger) more than the players involved (Jorge Orta and Todd Worrell) in the call that changed the 1985 World Series. No matter what Jim Joyce, by all accounts a respected umpire and person, does for the rest of his career, he’ll always be remembered for the 2010 gaffe that cost Detroit’s Armando Galarraga a perfect game. Anything that can prevent that sort of infamy is a step in the right direction, really. Recently, 15-year veteran Hunter Wendelstedt appeared on the Tampa Bay Rays’ pregame show to sing the praises of the replay system, saying “it’s a wonderful thing, and we embrace it.” If even umpires don’t mind being corrected, then it must be working well enough.

What hasn’t?

“Well enough” isn’t perfect, of course. Replay was never going to be seamless from the beginning, and it hasn’t been, particularly the charade that is the manager walking out to chat up the umpire and kill time while his video staff checks the play. Perhaps MLB can institute a rule in which a manager may only leave the dugout if he is doing so to initiate a challenge, putting into effect an NFL-style situation in which the challenge must be instituted before the next pitch is thrown. If that gives pitchers an incentive to get themselves set more quickly, then all the better, counteracting some of the added time that replay adds.

The other big issue people have had with replay isn’t a replay issue at all. It’s the so-called “Buster Posey rule,” also known as Rule 7.13, which prevents catchers from getting run over at the plate and has created endless issues due to uncertainty about the interpretations of it. That’s more of an unhappy coincidence that the change came into effect the same year as replay did, which has led to the unfortunate outcome that managers, figuring it’s worth a shot in the dark, come out to demand a replay regardless of how likely it is they’re correct. If and when that situation is cleared up, the replay issues should go along with it.

There’s a genuine argument that no one wants to see the celebration that ends the World Series delayed while the umpires congregate around a headset and wait for a replay decision. But there’s an even better argument that no one wants to see a World Series handed to the wrong team based on an incorrect call. So far, expanded replay has fixed hundreds of mistakes, and the negatives that have come with it are either minimal or can be worked out in time. We’re living in the future, and there’s no point in looking back.