Archive for Instant Replay

After the conclusion of yet another great regular season of baseball, we can now start in on the exciting year in review retrospectives. The stats are in, the playoffs are scheduled, and we can look back on the totality of 2015’s regular season with a full sample of what worked and what didn’t for players and teams. The first day after the end of the season can be disappointing for fans who don’t get to root for their favorite club during October, but it’s also our first chance to draw that all-important end line that frames this year along with all the others that have come before it.

The same goes for evaluating managers. We have an idea of the managers who have done a good job; many of them still have games to play. We also have an idea of those who haven’t done a good job — even up to the point of knowing who has a chance of being fired. The drawback, unfortunately, is that we still don’t have a great way of truly evaluating managers, and so we look to the small amount of data that we do have when we try to gauge their performance. Dave Cameron talked about this in the context of filling out his NL Manager of the Year ballot last year — here’s a paragraph from that piece relevant to what we’re discussing today:

“Evaluating player performance is tricky enough even with all the amount of information we have about their performance; with managers, we’re basically just guessing. We can speculate about things that we think matter, but we don’t really have much objective data to support these thoughts.”

Dave’s right — we have very little data, and the data that we do have isn’t terribly useful for evaluation. That being said, there is one newer area of data with respect to managers that I find interesting, and it lends itself to not only understanding an aspect of performance, but also — in this year’s case — serves as a window into the operating style of particular managers.

That data is the result of the fairly new system of manager replay review, and this season of baseball has produced some very interesting results. We already had a post earlier in the season on manager challenges, looking specifically at Kevin Cash, and his rather “unique” style of challenging (not waiting for any sort of video consultation from his coaches/advisors before popping out of the dugout to signal for an official review). That post theorized on a way to rank managers on their challenge ability; this post will go a step further in refining an attempt to do that.

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While I was on my daily ambulation through the equivalent of the basement archives at Baseball Reference (the manager pages), I came across a strange fact: Kevin Cash, rookie manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, has challenged nine times this season and has not won a single time. That seems very strange, given the fact that managers generally have a good idea of when they’re going to win challenges nowadays: it’s why they stand at the top of the dugout steps while someone looks at video before they actually challenge.

We’ve had just over a year of the challenge system in major league baseball, and already we have a good idea of the types of challenges managers are most likely to win, the ones they’re likely to lose, and the ones that still seem to go either way for reasons that haven’t been and might never be fully established. That understanding is engrained in managers to varying degrees, and we now have enough data on the subject to identify the ones that seem to get it and the ones that don’t.

So, how and why exactly has Cash gone 0-9 so far this year? Does it matter that he seems bad at winning challenges? It also got me thinking: how have other managers fared, and are we thinking about this in the wrong way?

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“Replay is coming! Replay is coming!” You can almost hear Ben Revere running through the streets of Philadelphia sounding the call, if I remember my American history correctly. I imagine that 98% of FanGraphs readers read the news last week and reacted with only glee, because decades after some of their major sports competitors started using instant replay, MLB is finally getting with the times. Anything that can stop preventable mistakes from happening is a good thing, as I think you’d agree.

I probably don’t need to regale you with dozens of examples of terribly blown calls, from Phil Cuzzi blowing up the 2009 ALCS to Jim Joyce ruining Armando Galarraga’s perfect game to Don Denkinger’s infamous error in the 1985 World Series, so I won’t. You know the game needs replay, and so do I. Still, for the one straggler among you who might just be on the fence about it, I absolutely can’t pass up the opportunity to reuse this still of arguably the worst call in the history of sports, Tim Welke calling Jerry Hairston out on this play in Colorado in 2012:

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Yesterday, it took Los Angeles Dodgers manager Clint Hurdle Don Mattingly* approximately 40 seconds — depending on where you start and stop your timer — to argue The Worst Call of the Season. Meanwhile, in St. Louis, it took the umpiring crew about 2 minutes and 50 seconds to gather in the infield, discuss Carlos Beltran’s hit, reconvene in their underground video review chamber, and then return to announce a home run.

* All white guys look the same to me.

Getting the calls wrong in baseball takes time. Managers — depending on their personality, the game situation, and the offense — take different amounts of time arguing both bad and good calls. The arguing, for the most part, exists because of uncertainty. My lip-reading skills inform me most arguments follow this general pattern:

Manager: “Did you really see X event?”

Umpire: “Most certainly did I see X event.”

Manager: “That statement you just made right there is tantamount to the excrement of bovines.”

Umpire: “You are ejected.”

Recent evidence suggests, however, that despite these conflicts resulting from close calls, instant replays still take more time than good ol’ fashioned shout-spittin’ matches.

Evidence furthermore suggests that in the time it takes to get in a healthy workout, a normal person could empty approximately ten Squeeze Cheese cans directly into his or her porcine gullet.

Which is to say: Quicker is not always better.

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Episode Thirty-Three
In which the panel is less than perfect.

Headlines
Armando Galarraga and the Prospects of Replay
Armando Galarraga and the Aesthetics of Perfection
Improving NERD: Putting a Number on Pleasure
… and other sly tricks!

Featuring
Dave Cameron, Full-Time Employee
Matt Klaassen, Resident Philosopher

Finally, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio on the flip-flop.

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