Replay: The Good, The Bad, The Incunclusive

I truly believe replay has been good for baseball, it really has, but it is still flawed and personally, I can think of just one adjustment it needs, and it might be as close to perfect as it could be.


The intimacy of the conversation between AJ Hinch and the home plate ump is  a brilliant work of video because you see what exactly has to be adjusted with the system.

Another good example is the case of this Brewers, Cubs game from a few weeks ago. To me, the video footage is pretty clear Lind was safe, but you can see the umpire in this video again has to resort to, "What can I tell you Joe, it's what they saw in New York". Obviously Maddon doesn't like that answer.


Umpires have to be able to better explain what was seen so they can relay that to managers and they can know. Managers get upset because what they see, obviously, leads them to believe their challenge is a good one.

Managers need more than just a "it's what the people in New York told me to call" answer.

Last year on this date there had been 748 plays challenged w\ 48% of them being over turned. This year there has been 715 challenges, 47% OT

— Ace of MLB Stats (@AceballStats) July 21, 2015

That isn't acceptable.

It's frustrating because what the teams see in their video rooms is not what is seen by the replay people in New York. That has to change.

While the system as a whole is great, to me, improvement has to be made in the explanation process of why a call is reversed or upheld, especially, for the side it impacts the most.

As mentioned in the Maddon video, managers are not allowed to argue a challenged call.

If you're going to take away the ability for a manager to get a satisfactory explanation for a given call, mainly because the umpires often times don't have one, then you cannot automatically eject them for asking.

To me that rule is stupid. I've seen enough replays take place during games the past few years to know managers aren't going to argue every time a call is reversed or upheld. But when they want an explanation or need to vent, they cannot automatically be ejected if the conversation is at least civil. Which in the case of Maddon and Hinch, they were.

So how do you fix this?

Do you give stadium scoreboard operators and team video personnel better access to the video they have in New York?

Do you put a webcam in the room where the video is being reviewed?

Do you just feed the stadium video boards the exact replays being viewed at a given moment during a challenge at your game?

I think there's probably a good solution in there somewhere and again, this may be the final piece to having an acceptable video review process in Major League Baseball.