Practical Replay

After last night’s game in Detroit (and in Seattle, but that didn’t get as much press), I’d imagine the overwhelming majority of fans are now in favor of some sort of instant replay in Major League Baseball. The current four umpire setup isn’t sufficient to get the calls right often enough. MLB even admits this in the post-season, adding two additional umpires to help try to ensure greater accuracy.

So, the real question is how to practically implement it. I’m not a big fan of the NFL’s system, where the onus is on the coaching staff to challenge a call and then the official has to leave the field in order to look at a monitor. I don’t want Tony LaRussa throwing flags on the field, and then Jim Joyce wandering into a tunnel somewhere for a few minutes. There has to be a better way.

The best suggestion seems to be to just add a fifth umpire to each crew and station him in front of a bank of television monitors. He could communicate with the rest of the crew by earpiece, and would have the power to overturn the call on the field. For situations like last night’s game in Detroit, the fix would be remarkably easy and take less than 30 seconds. Joyce calls Donald safe, the replay ump simply informs him that he was conclusively out, and the crew chief changes the call.

It gets a bit stickier in other situations, however, and this is where it would take some good planning to figure out what to do. There are quite a few plays where the reaction of the players on the field about what to do is based on a call on the field by the umpire. If a ball is ruled foul, the runners stop and return to their base. So, it’s not as simple as simply ruling the ball fair, because then you would have to figure out where the runners would have gotten had the call initially been right. I’m not sure there’s a good fix for this, so I’d probably lean towards having the replay umpire not be involved with fair/foul calls.

The replay umpire would be most useful on safe/out calls and on home run reviews, so I’d start there. Just give them authority to make the call in those situations. We’ll figure out fair/foul and balls/strikes at a later date. For now, though, a fifth umpire taking advantage of the technology we have seems like a no-brainer.